


Leaving Paradise

by NARKOTIKA



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alpha Derek, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Angst and Feels, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Derek Has Nightmares, Disabled Character, Drought Conditions, Dystopia, FTM Stiles, Falling In Love, Feral Behavior, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Historical References, Implications of Forced Marriage, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inspired by Mad Max, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Mating Bites, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Minor Violence, Mpreg, Older Derek, Omega Stiles, Physical Abuse, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Nuclear War, Religious Discussion, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Size Difference, Stiles Dreams, Stiles Stilinski Takes Care Of Derek Hale, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Werewolf Derek, aka the Hale Pack, and the stray children he loves to collect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-07-10 20:22:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 43,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7005013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NARKOTIKA/pseuds/NARKOTIKA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy dreams of freedom, a broken man finds home, and they learn to love in a world where it feels more impossible than water falling from the sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [maybe we could be the start of something](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWcGtLblBxs) ❀

Stiles Stilinski loved to dream about water. 

He had never seen the land when it was green.

His father did. His father was just a boy before the drought came. He used to talk about it all the time. He used to talk about his own father, the wheat they grew, the pride they felt. He always believed in the land, even after the Water Wars first began tearing the world apart.

It didn't end there. The Fuel Wars started soon after, ending what little peace remained between the last of the united countries. Everyone turned on each other—the allies on their unions, states within their own nations, then towns, and then neighbors.

Most people who were able to left, but Stiles' father had his reasons for staying. He was convinced the land would come back. It just needed water.

And he was right.

It was called Paradise for a reason.

 

❀❀❀

 

His hair was darker at one point, if he tried real hard to remember. More like his mother's. But over the years the sun brightened it, added a slight shine, softened the color to be more like his father's. Now the only thing that remained of his mother was how easily his pale skin burned and how, like her, the only thing that helped was covering up from head to toe. He hated it, but the white linens eased the sun's wrath, kept out the dust, kept in the heat. Tit for tat.

Stiles loved sayings from the Old World. He loved the books, the ones he'd found—his most sacred treasures—and hidden away, safe from the hands of the Colonel. The people from Before loved their sayings and their recipes and their religions. They loved their lists of words and their meanings, their fix-it manuals, their magazines. People had so much to say, and Stiles did, too. The Colonel didn't like it very much, all the things he shared, all the things he'd tell a friend if he had one. Instead he had this grown man, an alpha old enough to be his father yet too old to want to put up with an eleven-year-old's ramblings.

The Colonel was an impatient man. He hated waiting, especially when it was for something he so desperately wanted.

Stiles often wondered why the people from Before were always in such a hurry. Those people from Before, with their books and their Internet and their phones and their big, tall cities and their ticking, ticking, ticking clocks— _time_ —just another thing that fell away with the Old World. Those people, always rushed, always late. Stiles guessed that's why they called called themselves the human race.

 

❀❀❀

 

When Stiles turned twelve, his father died.

He struck a deal with the Colonel.

And he learned the true power of the thing called time.

 

❀❀❀

 

He was newly thirteen when the Colonel first snapped and hit him. "There's only one hell and it's the one we live in now," the Colonel had growled between gritted teeth, right into Stiles' shocked, tearful face.

He hadn't spoken for a week after that. Not about God, or religion, or books, or any of it.

Even if he'd wanted to, who would listen?

The Wasteland was a very lonely place, and his family was in the ground now. He had no one. He could go months at a time before seeing a new face. The only one he ever saw was the Colonel, and sometimes, maybe the Colonel's Jackals, with their grim, crooked grins and their leering gazes, when they'd drop off his portions or replace his canteens or come by and watch him, like wolves watch prey, simply because they could. Stiles would count his blessings, thank the spirit in the sky for never sending one into the Colonel's path—a wolf, that is.  _Were._

So he remained alone, with his books and his thoughts and the ghosts of his childhood watching over him. He often imagined he was living in a fairytale of sorts, trapped in a place he couldn't escape from, by a man who thought himself righteous and holy, who thought locking Stiles away in the desert was really for his protection, that controlling the water and the portions and the bordering land made him as great as the name he called himself.

The Colonel thought he was a god, but Stiles knew better.

This land belonged to Stiles. It was his father's. And before it was his father's, it was his grandfather's. The land was fertile, but it was thirsty. The Colonel controlled the water. And so the land remained dry. But it was still his. It was barren and untouched and brown. But it was his. And that was one thing the Colonel couldn't take away from him.

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles loved to dream about water, or, more specifically—rain.

He loved to dream about clouds rolling in, collecting over the valley, heavy and dark and healing.

He loved to dream that the water would begin to fall as a trickle, like how he imagined a kiss would be, soft at first, a promise of what was to come, and then—all at once.

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles found that hope was what kept him from dying.

Not the portions, not the water canteens, not the roof over his head or his books.

Out here, none of that mattered. Only a good head and a strong heart. Hope got you nowhere.

But Stiles liked having it anyway.

 

❀❀❀

 

"You've angered me, Stiles."

"We have a deal."

The Colonel pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing heavily, like he was dealing with a petulant child. He was, really. Dealing with a child.

"You promised," Siles said, fourteen and a half, bare arms already purpling from where the Jackals had gripped him too hard and forced him down onto his knees. "We said we'd wait for the rain."

The Colonel smiled. "Yes. We did say that, didn't we?"

Stiles swallowed past his fear. "You can't touch me. I'm not eighteen."

"Stiles," the Colonel sighed once more, rising from his chair. "You've been harboring a feral little wretch in the house for months." He brushed his fingers through Stiles' hair for a moment and then  _tugged._ "Did you really think this would go unpunished?"

_"He's your son!"_

The Colonel paused, snatched Stiles by the chin, and Stiles knew another bruise was already forming. He held his breath, too scared to move in fear that it would only anger the Colonel further.

"He's a frail pup who can barely breathe on his own," the Colonel coldly remarked, watching Stiles' face for even a glimmer of a reaction. "Fucking his mother was a mistake. She failed to do the one thing we paid her for. I left him to die for a reason."

Stiles had never wanted to see the Colonel's neck be snapped like a stick more than in that moment.

"But," the Colonel said, loosening his grip on Stiles' chin, "if you insist on wasting my resources to help that disappointment survive, I guess I have no choice, do I?"

Stiles sharply looked up, and he should have known, _he should have known-_

_"No-"_

The Colonel was already walking toward him, beginning to loosely unbind the thermal wire.

 _"No,_ Rafael, please, _don't-"_ Stiles began to scramble back, but two Jackals were already on him, forcing him still, on his knees, even as he writhed and cried out, pleading for the Colonel to forgive him, to show mercy like only the strongest of leaders do.

"What's happening?" came a confused little voice, and Stiles choked on a sob, felt all the air leave his lungs in the same second.

The Colonel lined himself up behind Stiles, planting a soft kiss on the omega's forehead. "What did I tell you, sweetheart?"

Stiles went limp, head falling to the side. "Look away, Scott," he whispered to the little boy in the corner of the room. "Just close your eyes, cover your ears, and count to ten, alright?" He tried for a smile, voice wavering, and Scott only hesitated for one more moment before his eyes fluttered shut, he turned to face the wall, little hands coming up to cover his ears, and began counting.

The Colonel tsked down at Stiles and murmured, "You just never shut up, huh?" And without another second to spare, pulled the wire over Stiles' neck, choking him, branding him, nearly killing him.

When Stiles closed his eyes, he expected to see a light, the kind they talked about in the books, the kind that meant you were going to a better place.

Instead, he saw rain.

 

❀❀❀

 

The rundown at the southern end of the Ridge wasn't exactly a secret, but its stream came from outside the valley and had been contaminated during the Long Winter, making it deadly.

Which was why Stiles was surprised when he found a real living, breathing man with his head half under the flow, bathing in it and somehow not yet dead.

His momentary shock fell backseat to his feet as he dropped his canteen to the ground and began sprinting, linens flying, headscarf tearing off as he ran, ran, ran to warn the man, to save him before Stiles had to be alone once more.

He was shouting, waving his arms. "Stop! The water's no good! Stop!" But the man couldn't hear him, couldn't see him, and Stiles felt like a burst of air was flooding to his face as the man finally turned to face the land, to face Stiles.

He was dark, a sharp contrast to what Stiles was used to seeing when he'd look in the mirror. His hair was even darker than the rest of him, inky and unkempt and everywhere—on his head, his face, his chest—and Stiles was left with only a split second to wager the color of the man's eyes before he was waking up in his bed, drenched in sweat, gasping, and wet between his legs.

_No._

He was fifteen and his first heat had come.

 

❀❀❀

 

Late into Stiles' sixteenth year, his house was nearly full to capacity.

Scott now had six foster siblings.

Stiles received a proper beating for each.

And always, _always_ , he prayed for rain.

 

❀❀❀

 

"There's a shadow," Erica said, the first one to notice the figure slowly trailing the distance from the south toward the house.

Stiles had ignored it, continued turning pages in his book, nose buried between one chapter and the next, bent over backward after an exhausting handful of moments of trying to find a comfortable position in the armchair.

"It's a man," Lydia announced a while later, positioned dead center in front of the window, collecting all the information she needed, her siblings gathered around her.

That peeked Stiles' curiosity. Could be a new Jackal. The kids rarely got excited over guests anymore. Stiles stood, plopping his book down on the cushion, walking over to the window to see what all the fuss was about.

He squinted. Were his eyes deceiving him?

Jackson nudged him. "Who is he?"

Stiles tilted his head, gazing out at the sand and the red set of the sun, watching the man draw closer and closer. "He looks like a dream I had before."

His heart seized suddenly, and he stumbled into a panic, shooing all the children up into the bunk, warning them not to come out. He went for the sawed-off shotgun, swinging the door wide open, barreling out onto the porch.

"Stop where you are!"

The figure paused, swaying in place. Stiles could only barely make him out through the dream-mist, the hazy waves of heat distorting the man's image. Before Stiles could get another word out, the man suddenly fell to his knees.

Stiles swallowed past the dryness in his throat and stepped off the porch, shotgun held up, aimed on the dark figure, as he slowly, cautiously, closed the distance between them.

He left a handful of paces and paused, but by the time he had come within proper earshot of the man, he had already smelt it.  _Alpha._ And the man had probably smelt him, too. He swallowed again, opening his mouth, but no words came out. He couldn't say anything at all, not for a lack of trying, but because this man, this  _alpha,_ was just staring at him, enraptured, slightly bewildered, but mostly just-

"Am I dead?"

Stiles paused once more. "No."

The man thought on this, Stiles could see the wheels turning in his head. "Then how are you here?" His voice was deep and rough, parched from lack of water, his lips cracked, hair scraggly and dark, and just  _so much of it._

"How are  _you_ here?" Stiles questioned, readjusting his grip on the shotgun. "You're a stranger. Strangers don't last long out here."

 _No. Not a stranger_ _,_ Stiles' mind supplied, drowning in green eyes, unable to stop.  _This was him. This was him._

The man continued to sway in place, staring up at Stiles like the heavens were calling for him. "The runoff," the man said, and Stiles could see the color beginning to drain from his face. "At the mouth of the valley-"

And Stiles suddenly understood, all of it clicking into place, any trace of doubt in his mind disappearing, immediately followed by dread. He lowered his gun without another thought, pulling the keffiyeh away from his face, letting it fall to his shoulders.  _This is the man from my dreams._

Stiles felt himself smile, a momentary flash of his innocent youth—seventeen and young, for one moment, here and now. _"Bringer of rain,"_ he whispered, and the man promptly turned to the side, vomited, bending at the knees, and passed out right there into the sand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiya, wonderful people! Brace yourselves, this is gonna be a big-ass note.
> 
> Alternate summary:
> 
> _The year is 2087._
> 
> _This is the future—where the Old World is just a twisted tale, where only 0.01% of the population remains, where children no longer have a childhood, where in a wasteland without water, vengeance will rain._
> 
> _This is Paradise: the luckiest little slice of Earth, completely untouched by radioactive contamination, home to Stiles Stilinski, an omega trapped in a deadly deal for his life, counting down the days until he'll have to surrender his father's land and become an unwilling mate to the wicked Colonel of the Ridge._
> 
> _The only thing that can save him? _Rain._ But in the middle of a decades-long drought, could a wandering, radiation-poisoned alpha with demons of his own just be his last hope?_
> 
> Main inspirations:  
> -Mad Max  
> -Young Ones  
> -Z for Zachariah  
> -Fallout
> 
> Genes/mutations as a result of biological warfare:  
> -a/b/o (80% chance):  
> >betas = most common  
> >alphas = second most common  
> >omegas = least common  
> -supernatural/were (10% chance):  
> >no hierarchy, meaning they'd only receive a dynamic if they also inherit the a/b/o gene
> 
> Please take care to mind your own wellbeing by keeping an eye on the tags (side note: the suicide reference tag is for later chapters and is brought up all of twice; it is very brief and not at all graphic/detailed). Also, not everything is going to be scientifically accurate, but alas, this is a work of fiction. Feel free to shoot me a message/ask on [Tumblr](https://bullsnatch.tumblr.com/) or drop me a comment if you've got any questions or concerns.
> 
> Hope you're as hyped as I am!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [How long did you starve? How long did you suffer?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHNDsB1Ktt8) ❀

Stiles didn't move at first, brows drawing together as seconds ticked by and the alpha continued to lay there face-down in the sand. He took a cautious step forward, and then another, and another, and when the man still didn't budge, Stiles poked the mouth of his shotgun into the man's side.

"He dead?" Erica hollered from the porch.

Stiles dropped to his knees and after multiple heaving attempts, managed to shove the alpha onto his back. He bent and pressed an ear to the man's chest, relief flooding his veins when he heard the steady _thumpthumpthump_ of the alpha's heart. "Not yet!" he called back to the house, and looked at the man's face.

He was beautiful in a rough sort of way, but he was older than Stiles had realized, too old for him to be kneeling there and getting all flushed and flustered, really. He was no stray orphan, that was for sure, not a child Stiles would pick up and bring home. Early to mid-thirties probably, maybe more. Stiles shook his head.  _Whatever this man's age, the Colonel is double it._

From a distance, when he'd seen the man through the dream-mist, his body had looked just this side of average build, height indiscernible, features a blurred mix of dark skin and hair and tattered clothes, not unlike the Jackals. But up close, really looking, Stiles could see that his beard was so dense and so dark that no light could escape it, his arms heavily muscled, hard and tanned, and the skin on his face was weathered. The man was practically as brown as a stretch of dirt. A second glance told Stiles that most of it probably was, in fact, just dirt.

"Boyd!" he yelled toward the house, slinging the shotgun over a shoulder and beginning to pull one of the alpha's heavy arms over the other. Boyd joined him a moment later, taking up the other side, and somehow, though still being just shy of fourteen and underfed, managed to bear a better part of the alpha's weight as they hauled him back to the house.

They had to strip him, soak him and scour him raw, but not before Stiles searched his pockets and sleeves, yanked off the man's boots, dug around the seams and linings of the man's pants until he had collected every last knife and gun and dumped them all into Kira's firearm deposit, a bin full of bleach with an artful  _No blood in the house!_ written across it, which, courtesy of Scott and Isaac, was paired with an assortment of animal stickers. Stiles also found a faded photograph, which he tucked into the waist of his linens without a second thought, dismissing the look Boyd shot him.

The alpha liked to mutter to himself and though he remained mostly unconscious, he had brief moments of clarity in which he'd mindlessly growl and gnash his teeth a whole lot, and then pass right out again. Stiles had to scorch the man's clothes and shoes, then his own and Boyd's, and they scrubbed themselves until Stiles was satisfied, the scathing sun drying them off within minutes. Stiles decided to hack off the awful length of the alpha's overgrown hair and beard as well, just for good measure, but he kind of regretted it afterward because it made it all the more difficult to keep himself focused on the task at hand and not on the man's distractingly attractive face.

They put the alpha in the room below the bunk, right next to Stiles', at the end of the hall, the furthest one from the front of the house, the one that used to be his father's. The bed creaked as they flopped him onto the mattress.

"Who is he?" Kira asked.

"He's the Green Man!" Isaac chirped.

"He's the  _Dream_ Man," corrected Lydia.

"He's real hairy." Jackson sniffed.

Stiles carried his tin box to the bed and pulled out a needle. The kids silently watched as he extracted a measure of Glory Water, found a prominent vein on the soft inside of the alpha's arm and stuck the needle in.

And a while later, when the alpha began to shiver, and Stiles pulled the covers up over him, the omega finally said, "He's the Rain Man," and herded them all out so their guest could sleep in peace.

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek woke wheezing and gasping. The omega's scent was still there, in the room, on his skin, in his lungs. It filled the space like air.

He'd slept—as good a death sentence as running naked through the Wasteland. A mistake—because the nightmares were relentless, and now the sight and smell of warm blood and scorched skin and dead eyes and the soft, sad sound of Laura's voice cut through his mind like a knife, shaking him fully awake. Hallucinations. _But they feel so real._ How long had it been since Derek had seen his sister?How long had he been here?

He suddenly jolted upright, or at least tried to, but the sickness exhausted him down to the very marrow of his bones, punched the last speck of energy right from his lungs. He made a frustrated grunt in the back of his throat, and it came out as a growl. It was hard to say when it was exactly that he had let the wolf in his blood bury him alive, hide Derek Hale in the shell of a body that used to be a man. _This is what you are. This is what you were created to be._

The only thing he was now was a ghost. A ghost trying to find home, where all the ghosts of his childhood would be waiting.

The door creaked open, and Derek held himself still. A moment later, the omega was standing over him, soft and lovely against the dim moonlight, a thing of such utter beauty that Derek immediately knew he was never meant to lay eyes upon him. A desert flower, a rose in the Wasteland.  _An angel, otherworldly, guarding me, scum of this wretched Earth._

The omega sat beside him, the mattress slightly dipping, and he put a damp cloth to Derek's brow.

"You got a name?" he whispered after a moment, and this time, when Derek replied, it came not as a growl, but as something soft and pitiful, a whimper, and he hated himself for it. He chose to not attempt to say anything more in the end, stubbornly refusing to share with this boy even one syllable of his name, biting it back. His name belonged to him and him alone. It was the last piece of himself he had.

The omega didn't seem to mind, simply smiled and pointed at himself. "Stiles."

Derek rolled it around on his tongue, allowed this foreign name but not his own. He hadn't seen anyone in so many days, over a hundred maybe, especially not an omega, and not ever this close, and the boy's scent was doing funny things to his head. He didn't like it, but he couldn't stop staring at him, either.

"What do you see?" Stiles asked softly, wringing the cloth out into the bowl by the bed, and when Derek remained obstinately silent, he looked down at the alpha, and the alpha looked evenly back at him, and he smiled again. "Why do you look at me like that?"

 _The moment I saw you, I thought death had taken me._ He internally shook his head.  _You look like everything I can never have._

It hurt to look at him, so Derek closed his eyes. He regretted it the instant he saw Laura's face beneath his lids, and he gritted his teeth against the onslaught of frightful images. The omega's hand was cool against his temple, smoothing back the damp, hacked-off mat of his hair.

He'd heal. He'd escape. He'd keep heading west. He'd find Beacon Hills, his childhood home, his sister, and he would forget this boy with gentle hands and kind eyes and compassion had ever even existed. _Fool_. There was no such thing as compassion, not in this world—only survival.

But then the cloth was back on his forehead and he opened his eyes and Stiles was smiling down at him, a breathtaking thing, and a surge of something deadly flooded Derek's chest: hope.

 

❀❀❀

 

On the third day, the Rain Man's fever finally broke.

Feeding him was a difficult task because Stiles was cutting into his own portions to keep the man alive. He spent half of his time trying to get the alpha to keep the food down, a piece of him chipping away every time the man vomited it up into the wastebasket. He wondered how the man had kept on all the muscle he had. He wondered how the man could be so large and solid, especially considering he was starved half to death by the time he had made it to the Ridge. Stiles practically had sticks for arms, what little protein there was in his diet refusing to cling to his bones. It made him slightly jealous, made him avoid brushing up against hard surfaces and knocking his elbows into things; it all proved just how frail he was, especially when the bruises would bloom by the day's end, a reminder, and he hated that part of himself. The Colonel didn't mind. Stiles spat at that thought.  _I don't belong to the Colonel_ _. I am not a thing._

Lydia suggested they toss the Rain Man off the Ridge, feed him to the famished coyotes.  _He's a dead man_ , she had said.  _Dead man means dead weight._

But Stiles refused to give up. He waited and he prayed and he prayed and he waited, even when the Glory Water began dwindling, even as he began giving some of his portions up all together, even when his stomach would cramp so hard from hunger that when he laid in bed long after all the others were asleep, he'd curl his legs up into his chest and softly cry into the bony dips of his knees—Stiles did not give up. The hunger was nothing new, but that didn't mean it got any easier. It didn't for Stiles, at least. Jackson liked to tease him. He'd joke that if they ever got a proper breeze out in this desert, Stiles would sound like a wind chime, air whistling past his ribs, his fingers and toes. He was no skeleton, but he was always hungry, and it showed as time dragged on.

This routine lasted more than twenty days, and the Rain Man was showing no improvement besides that first passing of the fever. Stiles was getting tired of starving, and he was tired of waiting, and he was tired of praying to a God that wasn't answering. The Rain Man didn't wake.

He didn't wake until he did.

It was late in the day, after second meal, and Stiles was hunched over his needlework, busy tailoring a new shirt for Boyd after he had to scorch the boy's favorite. He heard a creak from the alpha's room, and his eyes snapped to the gap under the man's door. A shadow passed over the floor, and Stiles was scrambling up, herding everyone to the ladder.

"Up, up, up," he directed, bundling a sleepy Scott onto Boyd's back, "quickly, quickly", urging them up through the hole in the ceiling, onto the second level. He had only a moment to spare before he turned, the Rain Man stood in the entry, and their eyes met.

He was a lot more intimidating standing up at his full height than Stiles remembered. His broad shoulders filled the frame of the doorway, his head nearly knocking the top.

"I suppose a thank-you is in order," the Rain Man said gruffly, his voice deep from not being used, and startling, so much so that Stiles was at a complete loss for words. It was strange to hear him speak after so many days of his silence.

Stiles nervously glanced down at the children's books on the table. "You hungry?" he asked suddenly.

The man nodded, gaze penetrating and hot on the back of Stiles' neck as the omega turned to fill a bowl with water, tearing open a portion packet and dumping it in. The water began to fizz, bubbling up, and Stiles took the time to fill the man a plate of beans and rice. When he turned back, the water bowl was filled with a fluffy loaf of bread. Stiles placed it all on the table and handed the alpha a spoon.

The Rain Man hesitated only a moment before he pulled out a chair and seated himself, tearing into the meal like, well, a starving man. Stiles was worried that if he kept eating at such a speed he'd vomit it all up, but the omega held his tongue and just watched.

When his plate was more than halfway empty, the Rain Man paused, looking up at Stiles as if suddenly remembering he was still there. He straightened, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.

"You were hungry," Stiles said, and internally smacked himself. He lowered his head, a habitual sign of submission beaten into him since he was little more than a child. The man gave him a taken aback look, then grunted and shoveled some more beans into his mouth.

"You came from the south?" Stiles asked.

"East."

"East?" Only death resided to the east, the sick land stretching cruelly for miles upon desolate, unending miles. "You crossed the Big Nothing?"

 _"Did you hear that?"_ came a sharp whisper from above, followed by a loud smack, and Stiles swallowed, looking at the alpha, but the man simply continued shoveling food into his mouth, unaware. _"_ _He crossed the Great White,"_ Erica hissed in awe.

"The White Sea?"

"He's gotta be a road warrior, swear he's gotta be," Kira's giddy, high-pitched whisper carried down to where Stiles and the Rain Man were seated, and Stiles felt his heart skip a beat, waiting for the man to leap across the table and strangle him until his eyes popped out of their sockets.

But it didn't happen. The Rain Man was completely oblivious.

Stiles scrambled up to fetch the alpha some water, making as much noise as possible—scraping the canteen forward over the counter and unplugging it into a pitcher, letting it drown out the titters escaping the bunk.

When the Rain Man was finished eating, he leaned back in his chair and murmured a quiet thank-you as Stiles carried the dirty dishes and cutlery to the sink. When he turned back, the alpha was holding one of the children's books in his hand, and Stiles froze. 

"Those-" he jolted forward, snatching the book away. "These are personal," he muttered, whisking them all into his arms and tearing away from the table so he could hide them. 

"Is there anyone else here?"

Stiles tripped, catching himself at the last minute, and whirled around.

"No."

The Rain Man nodded, absorbing this, and then he was pushing away from the table, and in two strides he was standing in front of Stiles.

Stiles dropped the books, pressing himself back against the wall, and waited for a fist to fly, but instead, the Rain Man just tilted his head down, bracing his hands on either side of Stiles' head, his lips within kissing distance of Stiles' neck, and when Stiles felt his heartbeat skyrocket, the alpha asked again, steadily, breath hot against the omega's pinkening ear: "Is there anyone else here?"

Isaac landed on the floor with a thud and was running for them as fast as his little legs could take him, frantically waving his arms, and he latched himself to the alpha's leg with a soft thud, pounding his little fists into the man's thigh. "No! No, no, no! Bad! You meanie! Don't hurt him!"

Derek looked down at Isaac like he was taking notice of a common insect. He looked up at Stiles, and back down at Isaac, then up at Stiles once more. He stepped away, and Stiles pulled Isaac behind him.

Erica stuck her head out of the hole in the ceiling, blonde curls tumbling down around her face. "Who was supposed to watch Isaac?"

Two more heads popped out. "Someone's gonna get an earful," Jackson teased Lydia, and she shoved him back up through the hole.

"He's a little rascal," was her excuse, raising an it-is-what-it-is kind of brow at Stiles.

The Rain Man seated himself again, taking a sip from his water. "Well, I guess that answers that."

"He's harmless," Lydia reasoned, climbing down, and Derek was staring at her wild, strawberry blonde head of hair. Stiles saw him bristle slightly when she added, "He let you nurse him back to health without a single rape and-or murder attempt. That's something."

"He was sick, if you hadn't noticed." Stiles appraised Derek for a moment. "How many people have you killed?"

"None who didn't try to kill me first," the alpha replied evenly, taking another sip of water. The deep greens of his eyes had secrets, and Stiles suddenly wanted them.

Lydia laughed and walked over to take Isaac's hand. "See?" She grinned viciously at the man.  _"Harmless."_

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles Stilinski, Derek learned, was seventeen, an Aquarius, and had an eerie fixation with God, of all things. He was pale, probably the palest person Derek had seen since he was a young boy. The omega was unmarred by war, unscathed by hard labor, untouched by the sun.Derek imagined that if snow still existed, it would look like this boy.  _How have you been surviving out here? Where did you come from, you who was not made for this Earth?_ he wanted to ask but did not.

Derek carved the thirtieth little slit into the frame of his bed. Anyone else might have looked at it and thought it was a record of how much sex he'd had here.

 _Thirty days._ He hadn't stayed anywhere this long since he was a teenager, back when he was fighting for a cause he couldn't know anything less about. He needed to head west, to get home, to find Laura. Thirty days ago, he wouldn't have thought of anything else. But Stiles had now—in some way Derek couldn't quite put his finger on—complicated his mission, and the journey to his death no longer held the same allure.

"What's the Rain Man do?" he heard Scott ask from the other room, sounding barely over a whisper. Derek had to strain to hear.

It was laughable. He was a wolf and yet he could barely hear any better than an average man. Sometimes worse. He cursed the wolf in his blood. Maybe if he'd learned not to rely on it so much he'd be able to see his sister again some day. Instead he'd likely die with a bullet in his back without ever having heard his killer approaching. 

"The Rain Man brings rain," Lydia said simply.

"Why's the rain matter?" Jackson scoffed. "The Colonel's got all the water we need. We don't need the rain."

"It'll save Stiles," Boyd said.

"He'll save Stiles?"

"The rain will save Stiles."

"The Rain Man will bring rain." Erica's voice was shrouded with approval. "He's gonna make it real green-like."

Later on in the early evening, Stiles hid Derek up in the bunk with the children, making sure the alpha had every last one of his possessions, from his biggest gun down to the discolored photograph Derek had been too stubborn to ask about. He wondered if Stiles knew he was a wolf.  _He has to know._ Derek's thoughts darkened like they always did.  _He knows and he pities you for it. A broken wolf, probably couldn't even protect him if it came down to it._

He heard engines in the distance, but he had to wait until they were much closer to be able to tell how many.  _Three_. They pulled up to the front of the house, and one engine cut. A heavy gait on the porch, followed by two others and a polite knock on the door. Derek heard Stiles turn the handle.

"Hello, Stiles," came the stomach-turning voice of a man. The other two pairs of feet stepped further into the house. "My," sighed the voice, and Derek's nausea returned to him tenfold.

There was the sound of a kiss, a noise so repulsive that Derek knew he wouldn't forget it for all his days to come.

"How I've missed you," the voice purred.

The door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut.

"My little dove."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sooo tired, man. I finished this draft mid-week, and I had to sit down and re-write the whole thing because it had disappeared like motherfucking magic. So tired. SO TIRED. Okay.
> 
> Side note: werewolves are biologically bigger/taller than humans since the gene was created to be used as a weapon. Size difference enthusiasts, you are so very welcome. Also, the whole meal portions thing is inspired by Star Wars VII.
> 
> Dream-mist = a mirage  
> Glory Water = medicine for radiation sickness  
> The Big Nothing/White Sea/Great White = the biggest stretch of wasteland lying to the east, taking up the majority of the midwest up to the Californian border
> 
> Tune in next Sunday for more!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [How do you believe in a god that's been watching all the hell from a heaven above?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deubG7dwGz8) ❀

The desert made Derek feel deaf. Or maybe he really was deaf. Some days it was harder to tell than others. But crouching there in the bunk, trying to focus every bit of himself on what was going on down below, only reminded him of how weak of a wolf he really was. His hearing betrayed him for the thousandth time, and Derek was forced to sit still, silently waiting. He shifted forward when he heard Stiles shout loud enough for all the kids' heads to turn in unison.

"Get your sausage-lookin' phalanges off that!" Stiles snapped, and then silence fell over Derek's ears once more. He was tempted to growl out in frustration, but Lydia, looking like she had just read his mind, shot him a murderous glare, and so Derek held his tongue until the heavy tread of feet departed from the house, walked off the porch, and the roar of engines lit up the night once more, peeling off across the desert.

Derek was the last one to emerge from the bunk, carefully retreating down the ladder, fatigue from the sickness still stubbornly sewn into his limbs. The kids were setting the table, and Stiles was hurriedly unboxing a new ration pack, clumsily filling several bowls, and Derek, despite his miserable hearing, was able to make out the fierce growl of Stiles' stomach above all the other noises in the kitchen.

Stiles looked up at him. "You sitting?"

Derek sat.

Stiles ate rapidly, without rest, and not for the first time, a wave of guilt swept over Derek.  _You starved for me, didn't you? Strayed to the brink of death for me? You shouldn't have, beauty. I am not worth even a moment of your suffering._

"Who was here?"

Stiles paused, cheeks round with half-chewed food. Derek waited.

"The Colonel," Boyd quietly said.

Derek furrowed his brows.

"The Colonel of the Ridge," Lydia said. Stiles stared down at his plate, shoulders twitching. He said nothing.

"The Colonel brings the food," Jackson said.

"The Colonel brings the water," Kira sadly added.

"Not for long." Erica patted Kira's head. "The Rain Man will do that now."

Derek continued to watch Stiles. "That all he was here for?"

Stiles fiddled with his spoon. "He came in his rig. It had him and two other men in it and it did what most cars do. It came in one direction and left in the other. That's all I can tell you about it."

Derek wanted to further interrogate him, but Stiles tugged his linens further around his neck and continued eating, ending the conversation.

Later that night, before bed, Derek saw Stiles hunched over at the table, a book falling apart in his lap. There were stray pages scattered in front of him, most with tears and crude rumples and creases. It looked unsalvageable.

Derek gritted his teeth, headed down the hall, and shut his bedroom door behind himself.

 

❀❀❀

 

Once Derek was finally up to revisiting the outside world, he learned that the house wasn't exactly what one would call a house.

It was an assortment of cargo containers, stacked this way and that, one atop the other in various directions, forming something in the general shape of what one could assume was a dwelling, but only really resembled a house from the inside looking out. The front porch was the only part of the outside that wasn't metal, wooden boards wrapping over the front and around the sides, shading the front door from the desert sun. There were a handful of windows, no glass. It must've taken lots of planning to build, out here in the sand and heat, without proper provisions. The halls and doorways and floors replicated that of a true house, the ventilation and design telling of someone who put love and consideration for safety into building it. Derek thought of Beacon Hills, of the preserve, the house that stood for generations on his family's lands, the home of his youth. He shook his head, and Erica giggled from her spot on her footstool, watching Derek sharply knock his whispering ghosts away.

"Wrench," Boyd directed, sticking his hand out from under the powder-blue Jeep. Erica put it in his palm.

"So when's the rain coming?" Erica asked Derek. He blankly stared back at her. She raised a brow. "Well?"

"Leave him alone, Erica," Boyd muttered.

"You're the Rain Man," Erica said seriously, eyes never straying from the alpha. "You're here for a reason. Stiles can't wait forever."

Derek turned his eyes to the motorbike at the other end of the garage.

"That one works. Not too well, though." Erica sighed, following his gaze. "The Colonel tried to kill it. Said he didn't want Stiles going off and getting himself hurt." Derek frowned. "Boyd'll fix it right proper, though. Boyd can fix anything."

 _Looks like he's got his hands full._ The Jeep was ancient. Derek wasn't sure there was any fix in the world that could save it.

Boyd popped his head out from under the vehicle, wiping his face on a rag. He chugged the water Erica gave him.

Derek took in the rest of his surroundings—the supply of water canteens stacked up against one side of the garage, the odd rope and shovel, the mane of wild red approaching from the house, a bright flame against the shimmering waves of heat. And once Lydia came to collect Erica, Boyd and Derek were left alone save for the sound of clicking tools and their own steady exhalations.

Neither of them were talkers, which didn't exactly make it uncomfortable, but Boyd was still a boy. He should have things to talk about. Derek was the broken one, the aging man who had seen things no one should ever have to see. Then again, the world they lived in was ruthless without regard for age. Children died. Bad men lived. That was life.  _Did Stiles find you, too? Did he save you like he saved me?_

"I was sick like you when he found me." Boyd didn't look at Derek, but had somehow read his mind. Derek was starting to learn that these kids had a sixth sense for that kind of thing. "He found me in the Badlands, when the Colonel still let him ride out to the outers of the Ridge. I was ten." He wiped his hands off on the rag, started sorting his tools back into a tool box, and Derek frowned once more at the mention of the Colonel. "I'd be dead if it wasn't for him." Boyd closed the box. "So would the others." He didn't look at Derek when he quietly added, "You would be, too."

Derek couldn't bring himself to be thankful, but he didn't let his thoughts betray his words. "He's different from what I'm used to," he carefully said instead.

"S'pose." Boyd stood and nodded for Derek to follow him back to the house. "I was called Vernon, after the gully my parents fucked next to." He frowned, wiping the back of an arm over his glistening brow. "Stiles told me I could pick a new name for myself if I hated it so much. Usually people just try to take it from you." A pang of understanding bubbled up inside of Derek. "So, yeah, guess that makes him different." He swung the door open. "Guess that's what made me stay." The door slammed shut behind him, leaving Derek halfway up porch, paused in his own tracks.

He felt the sweat on the back of his neck, the dry, suffocating air all around him, the blistering heat on his back, baking his shoulders through his shirt. He could leave. He could leave now. He could've left in the morning, the day before, three days before that, a week ago. There was no life for him out here in the desert and dust. Staying was never an option, but somehow, though the entire world still rested in the same place it had rested for all these years, the thought of leaving made something in Derek feel uneasy.

He turned away from the long stretch of wasteland that dwelled to the west and headed back inside.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

He didn't mean for it to happen, but Derek learned pretty early on that denying his attraction to Stiles was a losing game.

Stiles was beautiful, a pure, good thing, dropped into the middle of a cruel world plagued by nothing but darkness and iniquity. His existence was something Derek could not fathom. Not to say that he was a thing to worship or shelter, Derek knew those were actions of a man ruled by his cock, but Stiles was a rare creature in that he believed in so many things; in fact, Derek was sure that Stiles didn't just believe in everything _,_ but that he truly, genuinely  _loved_ everything. Every grain of sand. Every ray of light. It wasn't naiveté so much as it was...faith.

Derek had witnessed it to its full extent once, before the children had woken, when he wandered past Stiles' open bedroom door in the early morning. Not even the sun had fully risen, but there Stiles was, wrapped in his usual sheer linens, kneeling, facing the window of his room. His beloved books were stacked all over, on his bed, his small bedside table, strewn along the floor, but Derek paid them no mind as he observed for several moments as Stiles clasped his hands together, closed his eyes, and murmured into the still quiet of the shadowy, dozy, not-yet-awake world.

"Who do you pray to?" Derek had asked, and Stiles' shoulders tensed, taken off guard. He didn't turn.

"Whoever will listen," he replied, resuming.

Derek assessed him for a long, quiet while, waited until Stiles rose from his place on the floor, the sun steadily rising, casting faint streaks of light into the room. "How?" Derek didn't mean for it to sound so hostile, but he couldn't help it. It annoyed him. Why should he have to hide that? "How can your god allow any of this?" _This world. This life._ "Where has your god been?" He stood before the doorway of the omega's room, not inside, not blocking it, but he didn't try to make himself any less imposing, either. "Where is your god now?"

Stiles was occupied by his linens, his back to the alpha, but Derek could see his shrug.

"How can you believe in a god," Derek said, "that sees this hell we live in and does nothing?"

"He hasn't done nothing." Stiles threw the end of a linen around his neck, rucking it up over his throat, and finally turned. He looked up at the alpha, eyes big and sure and suddenly melting the anger in Derek all away. He shrugged once more, looking elsewhere. "He brought you to me, didn't he?"

Stiles passed him, retreated back down the hall, and Derek was still watching the gentle sway of the omega's hips when the sunlight slanted in at a certain angle, directly into Derek's eye, something in his brain telling him:  _focus_ — _keep moving_ _, home, Laura_ —and something in his bloodstream telling him:  _not on this._

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek learned about Erica when she collapsed to the sand one afternoon and began uncontrollably shaking.

Boyd was calm and collected, positioning Erica on her side, watching her limbs to make sure she didn't hurt herself as they waited it out. He carried her into the house, to the sofa, and Stiles took only one look before he crossed the room and quickly held her, folded her into him like a blanket, hiding her from the world, saving her with a skillful precision Derek didn't like knowing he had.

"It's not just her," Lydia told him quietly, later, after third meal, when everyone had left Stiles and Erica alone in the main room as Stiles softly hummed into the girl's hair, refusing to let go. "Lady Luck protected me. Boyd and Jackson, too. But the sickness was not kind to the younger ones." Lydia combed out a stubborn knot at the end of one of her red locks.  _Your hair looks like fire_ , Derek wanted to note approvingly.  _I had a sister with hair like yours._ _She's dead. Everyone I love is dead._

"Bring the rain soon," Lydia murmured, nudging her elbow into Derek's side. "The Colonel gets angry over lots of stuff, but he'll  _fume_ when the rain comes." She smiled, but it was mostly sad, and Derek tasted phantom blood on his tongue as she said, "The Colonel doesn't rule the land. The land belongs to all of us. The food, the water—all of it. It belongs to everyone. So bring the rain, Rain Man. We deserve something good." She pat his arm, turning away. "Especially Stiles."

 

❀❀❀

 

In the night, Derek was scared to sleep. He feared the bittersweet relief of rest, of shutting his eyes against the weariness that occupied his bones. Sleep brought the nightmares, the reminder that Laura was always— _still_ —waiting for him. He had grown accustomed to the creaks and groans of the house, of certain sounds that meant Stiles had gotten up to get water, or that he had decided to crack open another book in the middle of the night, or that he was touching himself, bringing relief, relaxing, undressing, coming on his own fingers, even when a fully-grown, alpha stranger was right next door—and Derek decided denying what the real problem was would only serve to exhaust him further, so he admitted it: the nightmares were there, but that wasn't the only reason he couldn't sleep.

The truth was, he hadn't been touched by anyone in years. A traitorous part of his brain wondered what would happen if he creaked open Stiles' door, stepped forward into the dark room, crawled into his bed, pulled up the thin sheet that the omega wore. Would Stiles welcome his touch? Let his pale legs fall open around Derek's waist? Let Derek press inside his wetness?

And every time these thoughts entered his mind, Derek forced them away, disgusted with himself. Why would Stiles want him? A broken wolf, a damaged alpha, old enough to realize he really is too old for the omega? Why would Stiles want him? _N_ _o good. No good for him._ Stiles deserved someone who could make him happy, like the things he liked, understand him, someone who wasn't fucked in the head, scared of their own thoughts, ready for death at every moment, someone who would stay.  _Like the Colonel?_ Derek pulled away from that thought. The Colonel could live a thousand lifetimes and never deserve Stiles.

Derek succumbed to the dark comfort of sleep.

_So could I._

 

❀❀❀

  

When Derek first learned that Scott was the Colonel's, he searched Stiles out, dark thoughts clouding his mind.

The Colonel had had Stiles. He'd laid atop Stiles and filled him with child. How had Derek been so blind? Of course Stiles was mated to the Colonel. He didn't exactly understand the dynamic of their relationship, but they had Scott together, and the Colonel housed Stiles, fed him, allowed him to keep the orphaned children.  _He could have slain them. A lesser man would have._

"Are you with child?" he asked immediately, standing mere feet from Stiles in the kitchen.

Stiles looked momentarily stunned but eventually shook his head. "How would I be?"

Derek stared, bewildered once more. "Scott," he said, and nothing more.

Stiles seemed to understand Derek's thought process all of a sudden, and his vision clouded over with something dark and full of hatred, bowing his head. "I'm not mated to the Colonel." A beat. "And I didn't carry Scott inside me, but he's mine all the same."

Derek wished he could savor the flood of relief that threatened to overwhelm him, but he tamped it down, took great effort to extinguish it.

He looked at Stiles' pale face and for a split second, entertained the idea of taking the omega with him when he would leave. Maybe he shouldn't be in such a rush to die. Maybe this desert offered more than met the eye. And though Derek had lived for thousands of days, not one of them could prepare him for those that were yet to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Age range:  
> Isaac = 5  
> Scott = 7  
> Kira = 8  
> Jackson = 10  
> Erica = 11  
> Lydia = 12  
> Boyd = 13
> 
> Badlands = any land contaminated by radiation
> 
> Hope you liked this one!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [you gotta believe in something](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Q6HYJOo2M) ❀

When he was young, and the Colonel was more tolerant and not yet hardened by age and grief, Stiles would climb up to the top of the Ridge and look out at the world. He'd imagine the land, how it was Before, when people lived everywhere and the Wasteland was green and wet. He'd perch on a rock out by the Pass and watch the people in Town, the weathered men—with their grimy, dirt-stricken faces and worn clothes—the strong fathers, the dependable mothers—who possessed a certain kind of gentleness that the world could not ever rip away from them—the elders—whose eyes said all, eyes that had seen the Old World, that knew that there was once a better time before all became dust and dirt—and the children—who fled from their innocence with a fierceness that ended up protecting them more than not.

Stiles would draw a story in his mind for everyone, of who they would've been had the world not died, how their lives would be different. Stiles knew his father would be a policeman, like the books talked about. He would "serve and protect" as it used to be said, kind of like the road warriors that were dispatched during the Last War, when the Long Winter had not yet spread to every corner of the world. And Stiles knew he, himself, would read. The same way he read now, only there would be more books. And a lot more time. And his father would still be alive, probably. And the Colonel would never have him. And the Rain Man would not have to save him. Because rain would happen all the time.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

Derek wasn't allowed to go to Town. It was reasonable considering Stiles was treated like a possession, and Derek didn't need to ask too many questions to know he'd probably end up being killed if he was found in the house, so he said nothing, even if it annoyed him, watching Stiles and the kids disappear in the bed of a truck that pulled up to pick them up with the sunrise. The only thing was, Derek had reached a limit. He refused to sit in the house and do nothing for even one more second.

So he walked.

He approached from the side of the bedrock, hoping to just come off as another wanderer, and the trek helped some, ruining his fresh clothes, dirt clinging to his skin, damp with sweat. No pair of eyes stayed on him too long, none except that of an elderly human man with skin dark as Boyd's, who was hunched over beneath the shade of a hut with the female version of himself crouched beside him. Their contemplating gazes lingered no more than a few seconds, but Derek felt naked and held at gunpoint all the same. He kept walking.

It was high noon by the time he caught sight of Stiles, the flash of the omega's white linens peeking out from over a high ledge, then just as quickly disappearing. He emerged in the crowd a handful of seconds later, the kids trailing behind him like baby ducklings. A group of raggedy children stopped and stared, the crowd parting slightly for, as a few were quick to call him, 'the Colonel's dove', kissing their palms and pressing them to their foreheads in a display of reverence. The children kept themselves at a distance, their eyes wide, and Derek realized that Stiles was probably the palest person they'd ever lay eyes on in this lifetime.

Derek watched from afar as Stiles visited certain stalls in the sea of tents erected into a market, trading portions and water for spare mechanic parts, fabric, and other little things Derek paid no mind to. The omega drew closer, and Derek hunched further into himself, hiding in the shadows, head down, inconspicuous. The ringing in his ear quickly grew, and Derek could only make out the tail end of Stiles' brief interaction with a stall owner before continuing past, the kids on his heels. "Pray for rain," the grizzled man murmured.

"Pray for rain," Stiles returned, allowing a smile small before slipping away.

And this prayer continued in parting with every shop owner as Stiles advanced toward the old man and woman in the hut by the bedrock, who received the omega with warm looks of affection. Derek glanced up just as Stiles bent and kneeled before them right there in the sand, kissing each of their dark, wrinkled hands, excitement and joy beaming from his face.

"You grow more beautiful each time I see you," the old woman said, cupping Stiles' cheek.

"Too bad it'll mean the death of him, then," the old man muttered, pulling Scott up onto one knee, and the old woman gave him a look that made Derek snort. He tuned out as Stiles spoke with them, though it was largely his own pitiful hearing that allowed him to hear only certain parts of the conversation. "There's a wolf," the old man said suddenly, and Derek froze.

"Here?" Stiles asked, surprised, and Derek's brows drew together. 

"We saw him not long ago. He came sniffing around from the desert." The old man kept his gaze steadily trained on Stiles. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

"About a wolf?"

"About a man."

Stiles fiddled with his linens, refusing eye contact. "Not a wolf."

The old woman frowned. "You wouldn't know a wolf if it bit you on your hind, Stiles," she said, waving the children into the hut. "He was wearing your father's boots."

Stiles' head shot up. "He's supposed to be at the house."

_"Stiles."_

"How do you know? How do you know he's a wolf?"

"We know."

"Of course you do," Stiles grumbled.

The woman held him suddenly. "This will not end well, Stiles. You're risking everything."

Derek saw the omega's shoulders begin shaking, and he realized that Stiles was laughing. "What, like everything I have isn't already on the line?"

The old man shook his head, hands clasped together. "You need to ask yourself if he's worth it."

Stiles stood. "I couldn't let him die."

"You don't know him."

"I saved a life and that's all that matters." Stiles shoved open the flap of the hut. "Say goodbye to Deaton and Marin," he told the kids, sweeping Scott up into his arms.

"You're playing a dangerous game," Deaton said, and Derek winced, hearing the creaks in his bones as the old man stood. "Your eighteenth year is close. What are you hoping for?"

"Alan," Marin calmly said, tangling her fingers with Stiles'. "He's made his decision."

Deaton's frown deepened. "I wish there was more I could do," he quietly said, regretful.

Stiles deflated some. "Blaming yourself does nothing," he said. "I made that deal."

"You were a child."

"I had to do something."

Derek had half a mind to busy himself, look less suspicious, but his hearing was being kind and he couldn't afford even a moment's distraction.

"There's still time," Stiles said, something too sad in his voice to tolerate. It made Derek's skin crawl.

Marin smiled at the omega and hugged him. "Still so much hope in you," she murmured. "So much like your mother."

Stiles shortly departed with the children, and Derek was moving before his brain could catch on. Deaton and Marin looked up, irritatingly calm as they watched him approach. He stood awkwardly, the sun hotly beating down on him as they all stared at each other for what seemed like forever.

"Pray for rain," Deaton finally said, clear and steady, something knowing and keen rooted in his gaze.

Derek stepped back. "Pray for rain," he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

 

❀❀❀

 

The Rain Man was a wolf.

It made Stiles blush real hard when that sunk in.

_The Rain Man is a wolf._

He was too embarrassed to touch himself that night, but he dreamt.

Oh, he dreamt.

He dreamt of the usual, of water—a sea, a river, a waterfall—and the ache inside him gushed like an aquifer. He quivered with it, squeezed his legs together, tried to ignore it, but the dream was all-consuming, inescapable. It made way for wandering thoughts of others things, like large, calloused hands, broad, tanned shoulders, dark, untrimmed faces, and green, green eyes.

 

❀❀❀

 

"Your faith astounds me," Derek said, not for the first time.

The omega turned a page in his book. "Everyone believes in something."

_How can I tell you how wrong you are? How do I tell you I am the living proof?_

"Have you told your god he left the world in the hands of the wrong people?" Derek asked.

"Everything happens for a reason."

"Right," Derek said, clenching his fists against the onslaught of warm blood and smoke filling his lungs, clouding his head. "Including the deal you made with the Colonel?"

Stiles froze. "How do you know about that?"

"Does it matter? I know."

"It's not important."

"You're a bad liar."

"Am I? I've kept you hidden for this long." Stiles said it bitingly, but he finally met Derek's eyes, and that was a small victory in Derek's books.

"Are you going to tell me?"

Stiles held his book up. "No."

"Then I'll make my assumptions."

"Be my guest. You are one after all."

"And what are you? The Colonel's caged little dove—untouchable, forbidden, owned."

"He doesn't own me."

"Then what would you call it?"

Stiles glared at him. "I am not a thing. I made a deal to keep my father's land. That's _all."_

It was Derek's turn to freeze.

"If the rain doesn't come by the time I'm eighteen, the Colonel takes the land," Stiles said, lifting his book again. "Assumptions, indeed."

"You're not as smart as I thought you were if you think that'll be the only thing he takes."

Stiles jolted up, slamming his book closed. "You know nothing, Rain Man."

"Your faith blinds you."

"You don't know anything about my faith."

"Faith makes people reckless."

"I can say the same about those who lack it."

They stared at each other, the air prickling with anger and something else, something softer yet more volatile. Derek glanced down at the omega's small, linen-wrapped breasts and looked away again. "You won't be safe forever," Derek said softly. "There are bad people out there."

Stiles looked down at his feet, shaking his head, and laughed. "You think I don't know that?" His voice was almost a whisper. "But how would I live with myself if I didn't believe things could be different?"

 

❀❀❀ 

 

"Where were you trying to go?" Stiles finally asked one day, adding the finishing touches to Boyd's new shirt. He didn't look up from his needlework.

Derek allowed the ringing in his ear to distract him for a moment before replying, "Home."

"Home?"

"West."

Stiles' fingers paused. 

"What is it?"

Stiles shook his head.

"Tell me."

Stiles placed the shirt down, unable to meet Derek's eyes.

_"Tell me."_

"Nothing lies in the west."

_Mark time._

Stiles looked up, and whatever he saw on Derek's face made his lips press together, his head bowing in regret.

"You lie," Derek whispered.

"No-"

_"You're lying."_

_I'll see you soon._

"The Colonel said-"

"Said _what?"_ Derek snapped, jerking up from the table, chair knocking over. "You believe him? You believe a single word out of his fucking mouth?"

"I wouldn't lie to you." Stiles straightened, refusing to look away.

"No. But the king of your desert wouldn't even hesitate. He'd tell you anything. How do you think he's kept you here so long?"

Now Stiles stood, jaw set. "You don't know anything," he snarled, and Derek was momentarily taken aback. "You don't know a fucking thing."

"I know that you've kept these children safe, and yourself, somehow, and now you pray to a god, you pray he'll save you, you pray for rain, and you think—what? That _I'll_ bring it? That _I'll_ bring the rain?"

"You _will-"_

"Rain Man, Rain Man, he says, I'm no fucking Rain Man _—I'm barely even a man."_

"I don't believe that."

"You think your god has brought me here to bring you rain."

"I-"

"You think he would intervene like that, that he has the power to do what he's done to this earth, to save what needs saving, to save you? Look around!" Derek spread his arms, gesturing at the whole fucking world. "God didn't do this! _We_ _did!"_

Stiles stood silent, hands clenched at his sides, and Derek looked at the omega's pale face. He exhaled through his nose, defeated.

_I wasn't meant to be saved by you. If there is a god, he sent you to me, not the other way around. I can't save you like that. I can't be what you need. I'm not anything you think I am._

"Will you still go?" Stiles whispered.

 _Yes,_ Derek wanted to answer. _I will always go. You don't want a life with me, angel._

He walked out.

 

❀❀❀

 

For an entire week, Derek didn't sleep, haunted by Laura's waiting ghost, her voice constantly in his ear— _mark time, brother, mark time—_ until one night, the darkness was somehow, in some way, less threatening as Derek closed his eyes to rest.

The terrors were calm, the scary images remaining hidden.

That night, Derek didn't startle himself awake from a nightmare.

That night, Derek dreamt for the first time since he was a boy.

There was softness, like that of linens, a pleasant voice, pale skin, the eyes of a doe—big, hazel, hypnotizing—and lots and lots of rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Town = populated by the people of the Ridge, resides before the Pass  
> the Pass = main entrance/exit to the Ridge, facing westward  
> the Last War = complete global nuclear fallout, the end of the end  
> the Long Winter = nuclear winter  
> road warriors = the last soldiers sent out to maintain order before the federal government collapsed
> 
> I aged Deaton (80ish) and Marin (75ish) way up for the sake of plot. Also, in this fic they're spouses, not siblings.
> 
> Have a great Father's Day!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [life cannot grow where man has been But inside you, you still believe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPi6KIu9dw) ❀

A long, long time ago, when Stiles' father and mother were both alive and they were a happy family, the Colonel was a nicer man.

The Colonel went by the name Rafael, and he didn't have Jackals back then, or if he did, he treated them like actual people—friends, even—not like annoying flies to swat at. The Colonel owned most of the land along the Ridge, but Stiles' father also had some, and though the Colonel didn't like that, he never tried to do anything about it, either. At least not until Stiles' father died.

Stiles buried his father, and on that very same day, the Colonel came for him.

He was twelve. Twelve, starving, and an orphan. He was as good as dead. The Colonel wouldn't kill him, though, Stiles knew that. The Colonel was not so merciful. No, he'd rip Stiles' home away from him, take the land for himself, rape him, impregnate him, make him birth children of a loveless mating. All the future held was suffering. But there was something inside of Stiles that wasn't ready to give up, a certain drive that refused to go down without a fight.  _Believe_ _,_ it whispered.  _You have to believe._

So he greeted the Colonel out on his father's porch and announced that the rain would decide for them.

The Colonel had laughed. "You know I can take whatever I want," he had said darkly, calmly, a fact—true as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west—and the men that were once his equals crowed from behind him, most of their faces scarred and branded, property of the Colonel, expendable. "And why should I agree to this?" the Colonel humoured Stiles.

"Because you have nothing to lose." Stiles felt his hands tremble. "Or do you think the rain could come?"

The Colonel had appraised him for an insufferable minute, but it was a lot more time than Stiles had expected the alpha to take, so he bit his tongue and said nothing, just waited.

"You know I'm not a patient man," the Colonel slowly said, though no anger was written into his tanned, aging face. "I want what's mine, Stiles."

"And you'll have it," Stiles replied, though his voice shook. "Take me now and I will fight you at every turn. I'll shoot myself. And if I can't find a gun, I'll slit my own throat, and if you hide every last thing with a pointed end away from me, I will bite my own tongue in half and bleed myself to death." The Jackals grew quiet, their mindless hooting and howling falling slack in the dry, early evening air. "But if you wait," Stiles continued, steadier, more collected with the added satisfaction of finally being taken seriously, "I will go willingly."  _However willing I can pretend to be._ "I'll give you my land."  _You won't ever erase the true people of this desert._ "I'll bear your children."  _I'll hate you more than I'll ever love them._ "And you'll keep me forever, because I've come to you all on my own, the way you really want me to."

"Colonel-"

"Great One-"

_"Quiet."_

The Colonel stared at Stiles, one foot up the stairs of the porch. The air crackled with tension, and Stiles savored the last sweet breaths he'd ever take as a free person.

"Alright, then."

Stiles felt like he'd faint. "A-Alright?"

The Colonel took his foot off the porch. He calmly combed a hand through his hair. "Alright."

He departed without another word, tearing away on his motorbike, his Jackals splitting off behind him, the desert sand rising up in a hazy puff of dust. Stiles buckled, dropping down, knobby knees hitting the old wood of the porch. He was too shaken to allow himself relief, only the awe of what had just happened remaining, eating him alive. The tears came suddenly, salty and wet, such a novel feeling against his usually chapped lips, and it reminded him of how thirsty he was, how dependent he'd been his whole life, how his father was dead, buried, never coming back, and how stupid he had been to believe, even for a second, that the rain could ever really come.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

Stiles didn't know what made him lie to the Rain Man about his deal with the Colonel, but what he did know was that he didn't want to find out what the alpha would do if he knew the truth. Not that he  _would_ necessarily do anything, but Stiles most certainly didn't want to risk it. He wasn't blind. He saw the way the Rain Man looked at him. It was different from how the Colonel or the Jackals would, less predatory and more tender, a way that made Stiles warm from head to toe, even when he was nowhere near the sun or sand. He liked it.

And maybe it was selfish. Maybe the Rain Man had a right to know how truly dangerous harboring him in the house was. But Stiles couldn't bear to give up their carefully balanced start of a life together, what the Rain Man could mean for him. The alpha wasn't just a means to an end anymore, but a welcomed fixture in a house that had been missing a certain kind of something for a long, long time. That first moment Stiles had laid eyes on the Rain Man, his heart had sighed, and that sigh washed through his veins, bloomed across his skin, sprouted from the parts inside him he had not known even existed, scattered from somewhere deep within, from that place that had never felt the warmth of the burning desert, the truth wrath of the dying world, that had never seen the light. It poured out of him from that place that had taken all of his hope and given him only despair. _There you are,_ it said.  _I've finally found you._

 

❀❀❀

  

One day, in the middle of Jackson tattling on Erica, she just snapped and bit him right in front of Stiles. Derek was so stunned he just stood and watched. She said, "If I'm getting punished for it, I'm going to actually do it." She ran off before Stiles could react, leaving a sniffling Jackson behind for Stiles to rush over to and hold.

"I'm sorry," Jackson hiccuped a while later, trying to reign in his tears, stubbornly stifling his cries.

"It's okay," Stiles told him, combing his fingers through the boy's hair. "It should never be a shame to you."

Derek was struck with a sudden recollection of his childhood, playing and fighting with Laura, a time when children still had a short few years to hold onto their fleeting youth. He remembered being just a boy, no older than Jackson, probably younger, and feeling that first cruel shock of reality, of the world he'd been handed, ripping his home, his family away, snatching him from the people he loved. He was just a boy.

He was just a boy and he never cried again.

 

❀❀❀

 

"My mom was like you," Stiles told him.

"Like me?"

Stiles laughed. "Yeah. She didn't really think the land would ever be green again, either." He sighed. "But Dad did. Marin says I'm like Mom more than I'm like him, though." A dip formed between the omega's brows as he considered it. "I don't think so," he said eventually. "Dad believed in the land, and so did I. And I had hope." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Mom did, too. She didn't believe in that much, but she believed in hope. And she believed in Dad. So I guess that makes me kinda like her anyway."

Derek was quiet. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Why not?"

Derek didn't know how to respond.

 

❀❀❀

  

The first time Derek saw Stiles undress was an accident.

It was late into the night, the house lit only by one oil lamp and the light of the moon. He hadn't been able to sleep, his ghosts invading his every thought. He was laying across his bed, and it was by chance that he had glanced to his left, and through the gap of his open door, seen Stiles at the end of the hall, in the main room, unhurriedly stripping his linens off.

First the head covering went, falling to the omega's shoulders. Then the shoulders were bared, and when he half-turned to head to bed, that first layer of his linens pulling away from his throat entirely, Derek's heart lodged itself in his throat.

A prominent line of raised skin, a scar as straight as an arrow, ran across the omega's pale neck, upsetting and out of place and most unquestionably not a mark of an accident _—you don't know that, you don't know anything—_ but that of ownership.

It's not that Derek hadn't questioned the Colonel's true character, but he had wanted to believe in Stiles' unrelenting faith. This may have been Stiles' father's land, but the isolation triggered other thoughts in Derek's head. The Colonel treated Stiles like his treasure, his property, keeping up his end of the bargain by respecting physical borders and autonomy, but also hiding Stiles away in a selfish, inapt manner—ruining the bike in the garage, controlling all supply of food and water, creating complete dependency—actions of a man with more than just a plan to be handed the land when the time would come.

And the Colonel wasn't the only one with a cock, but the only thing that kept the Jackals from stepping out of line was how much they feared the wrath of their king. The Colonel's word overrode all else. Even a childish deal made by a young, lonely omega out in the heart of the desert.

Derek didn't look away. His eyes followed Stiles' movements as the omega continued to peel away each layer of linen—torso, legs, all looking unharmed and pale as the rest of him, to Derek's unsettling relief.

The change struck something inside him, like a zap, jolting him. When had he started to care so much? Who was he in the grand scheme of it all?  _No one._

Stiles paused in front of his own door, his eyes meeting Derek's, holding the lamp up, washing the space between them in its warm, golden light. He held his discarded linens in one arm. What remained was a simple shift, thin and white and not leaving very much to the imagination. Derek swallowed.

Beacon Hills was and would always be the next step. Whatever got him closer, that was the choice Derek would make. That'd been his only choice for the last fifteen years. He'd known nothing else. He wouldn't stop now. Even if it meant leaving all of this behind.

Stiles blew out the flame, plunging them into darkness.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

The Rain Man started helping Boyd in the garage. When Stiles would step out of the house, most times he'd find them hunched over together, covered in grease, tinkering with different parts, trying to fix the motorbike. Other times they were strewn halfway under the Jeep, the Rain Man quietly pointing out certain components and segments to Boyd, what-to-dos and what-nots. The Rain Man was _teaching_ Boyd, and he wasn't...child-proof, in the most general sense.

But Stiles quickly learned that the alpha had a way with the kids that wasn't too rough or too cruel or too stingy, so they all got on well enough. Isaac still had his moments of distrust, but overall, the Rain Man had become a popular target for climbing and annoying and learning.

Stiles couldn't complain.

 

❀❀❀

 

The first year after his father's death was the hardest. His mother passed when he was still quite young, too young to remember her properly but old enough to have vague, hazy memories. After making the deal with the Colonel, Stiles thought he'd kill himself if the elements chose to take their sweet time. How could he be so stupid? What good was that deal? All it did was delay the inevitable. He was foolish to think anything could save him, especially the rain. Hope was a dangerous thing.

But as time passed, Stiles grew less resentful to his younger self and allowed that hope, that faith, to guide him, to wake him in the morning, to let him sleep at night. The thought of the rain not coming, of the deal just being a form of bought time, became a distant idea that Stiles felt stranger to. It was no longer about waiting for his impending fate, of facing the days with the constant knowledge that he'd one day be owned by the Colonel in every conceivable way, but it was about belief. And he did believe, truly, with every ounce of his being, that something good had to happen.

And he was right.

Perhaps that was what he had been waiting for. Something different from himself. Something rougher, braver. _Someone_. Someone resilient and tenacious and driven by the promise of death. Stiles was too soft, too gentle, too trusting to survive in a place like this desert, and yet he had never been able to bring himself to leave it. Paradise was his home. The sand was in his blood.

The Rain Man was different. He was strong, in the traditional way, the only way that mattered in the Wasteland. But he had ghosts and dreams and things that haunted him, like Stiles, and he was quite sad, quite broken, also like Stiles.

"Have you had them long?" Stiles worked up the courage to ask. "Your dreams?"

The Rain Man laid quietly across the porch, unresponsive at first, like he always was. "We all have dreams," he finally answered.

"What are yours about?"

The Rain Man didn't answer.

"Mine are of here, mostly," Stiles half-lied.

The Rain Man snorted. "Paradise? How can you dream about this place?" He let his eyes fall open, trailing them over Stiles' face. "How can you love it so much?"

Stiles shrugged and looked away. "That's how love works, right? Even when it hurts, or doesn't return, or does nothing for you, you still love it." He tried not to think that maybe that was how the Colonel's brain worked.

"No," the Rain Man replied, sitting up. He said nothing more for a moment, and then: "There's more to love than this."  _This_. As in Stiles' home, all he'd ever known, the land his father died trying to save. The Rain Man cleared his throat. "I wouldn't really know, anyway." 

Stiles couldn't help but laugh. "Don't tell me you've never mated."

"I haven't."

Stiles felt his jaw drop.

The Rain Man was quick to clarify, saying, "I've rutted. It's not the same as mating."

Stiles flushed. "I know  _that._ I meant only that-" he felt his blush deepen "-you're...attractive." He wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear.  _I don't know you, but you're more than just a handsome face, Rain Man._  "It's hard to imagine you not ever falling in love."

"Falling in love?" Stiles refused to meet the alpha's eyes. "And you?"  _Oh, have mercy._ "You've never mated." An observation. "Have you rutted?"

Stiles sucked in a sharp breath, the warmth in his cheeks eating away at him. "No," he said quietly.

The Rain Man didn't laugh or say anything.

Stiles fidgeted, hands balled into his linens as he dwelled over his own words. "I don't think I'll...do that just yet." He sunk his feet into the sand. "I want to be in love." A small truth.

When he looked back, the Rain Man was watching him intensely. He whispered it this time: "Love?"

"Yeah!" Jackson laughed, running out of the house, the rest of the rascals on his tail. "Stiles wants  _love_ _,"_ he teased.

"A wedding!" Kira piped up, patiently waiting as Lydia tied her scarf over her head, a meager shield from the sun. Stiles turned ruddy again and sheepishly laughed down at his toes, shaking his head. Weddings were a silly, archaic custom that Stiles wouldn't even know about had it not been for his books.

"And a ring!" Erica added, plopping down next to the Rain Man.

The alpha's brows drew together in that lost, grouchy way of his. "Mating," Stiles explained, overheating from the fevered desert and, of course, utter embarrassment. "They used to call it marriage in the Old World." The very idea was absurd, and Stiles couldn't help but feel mortified. This world they lived in did not allow minor moments of happiness, symbols of devotion and undying love. All that mattered was surviving one day to the next. 

He was hesitant to see the Rain Man's reaction, but there was nothing unpleasant or demeaning written across the alpha's face when their eyes met again. Only amusement. The hint of a smile.

"You never told me what you dream about," Stiles said later.

The Rain Man leaned against the doorframe. "How about a truth for a truth?" He crossed his arms. "I'll tell you what I dream about if you tell me what you dream about."

Stiles opened his mouth to remind the Rain Man that he had already told him, but the alpha shut him up with a raised brow.

"What you  _really_ dream about," the Rain Man said.

Stiles chewed his lip.

"Rain."

The Rain Man uncrossed his arms.

"I dream about rain."

The Rain Man's gaze roamed over his face. He nodded once, as if receiving a most important answer. "Me, too," he quietly said, and then just as quickly as he had entered the room, he was gone.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

"The sky is trying to tell us something," came Kira's voice from outside, awed and speculating.

"Don't be silly, the sky can't talk," Jackson responded, dismissive, and then his voice trailed off, ceasing altogether.

"Everything can talk," Erica said, more daydreamy than usual. "We just have to learn how to listen."

Stiles walked out onto the porch. He stepped down into the sand, slotting himself between the children, whose eyes were wide and trained directly on the northern sky, right overhead the house.

Stiles turned, looked up, and that's when he laid eyes on the first cloud he had ever seen in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be going on vacation for 2-3 weeks so you may not see an update for a while unless I manage to find the time. I hate leaving you guys hanging, but we'll see how I manage. Hope everyone is having an awesome summer!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [I have only love Is that a choice, still?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxz2Os_sa-g) ❀

Derek dreamed.

His dreams—they weren't _exactly_ dreams because they weren't the most pleasant of hallucinations, but they were certainly not nightmares, because Derek, haunted and broken and always running, was not afraid—were filled with Stiles and rain, _so much rain._

They were strange, a foreign form of phantasm he was unused to. He was more familiar with his ghosts and his night terrors, the demons that threatened to consume him every time he closed his eyes. He was unaccustomed to the way these dreams made him feel—the vulnerable relief when he didn't wake from a cold sweat, the guilt, because maybe he deserved to be terrorized by his own mind, and the strange sense of sadness that would settle over him when he'd finally wake.

_"I dream about rain."_

_"Me, too."_

But that wasn't completely true.

_I also dream of you._

❀❀❀

 

The Rain Man was more of a closed book than the ancient muck-covered ones Stiles liked to dig up in his spare time. He did not share things about himself. He did not see the need to fill silences with words, pointless or no, like Stiles did. He most certainly was not the sociable type, that much was obvious, and Stiles, who prided himself on being able to read people, was unable to unravel the mystery behind the Rain Man.

But sometimes— _rarely_ —the Rain Man let his guard down. When he was so focused on screwing in a motorcycle part or unwiring something in the Jeep or staring out the window, sitting still in a chair, for one moment, not surviving, but just being. Sometimes his mask slipped. Sometimes Stiles could see the hell on his face, and he'd just know that wherever the Rain Man had been, now he was somewhere better. That's what kept Stiles from prying, if nothing else.

And when he thought of the Rain Man leaving, of him moving on, of the desert just being a stop on the way, it made Stiles feel heavy. It was stupid to get attached. There was nothing here in the desert—not that there was anything beyond the Ridge, either, the Colonel had made that clear to Stiles on multiple different accounts—to make the Rain Man stay. Not even the lonely little cloud that passed over Paradise seemed to sway him. There was nothing here. Just Stiles.

So he'd shove the thought to the back of his mind. He'd ignore the panic that arose in him when he imagined it. And he'd quietly, subtly, so as not to let the Rain Man read him, pray that he'd choose to stick around after all, whether more clouds came or not.

 

❀❀❀

 

Despite their initial meeting, Isaac had considerably warmed up to Derek with each day that passed. The boy liked to follow him around, a pup on his tail, and anything Isaac did, Scott also wanted to do, so Derek had gained two little admirers, despite the lack of entertainment Derek afforded, observing and following suit until they grew bored or one of the other kids swept them away.

After third meal, they'd crawl into his lap as Stiles read them all stories from his books, snuggling down into his sides, burrowing themselves between Derek and the cushions. When they'd doze off, Stiles would peel one off him like a leech and carry them up to the bunk one by one. Eventually, Derek just found it easier to carry them up himself. Stiles had a hard enough time getting everyone else to bed, anyway.

"You're good with him," Stiles told Derek one night, as Derek put Isaac down with the rest of his siblings. "He doesn't usually like alphas." Derek wasn't sure what to make of that. It wasn't really a compliment, and he didn't take it as one considering the standard of alphas that Stiles and the children were accustomed to. _He doesn't usually like alphas._ Derek pressed his lips together. Cora liked him, too, and he failed her. He glanced down at Isaac's peaceful face. _Remember not to trust too easily, little one._

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles wouldn't stop fidgeting.

More than usual, at least. His knee was bouncing, fingers twitching in his lap. Derek was tempted enough to pause his tinkering at the table, get up, and walk the space over to the sofa to still the omega's leg himself. "What is it?" he questioned before his feet could betray him.

Stiles froze. Derek heard the skip in his heartbeat. The omega hesitated before he stood, slowly walked over and came to a stop in front of the alpha, biting his lip in a way that made Derek have to look away. "I've got a secret," Stiles confessed, and then Derek tensed, waiting for the omega to drop some sort of bomb on him—"You died all those days ago and this is the afterlife" or "I'm just a ghost like everyone else you're always seeing".

Derek sat with his heart lodged in his throat as Stiles ran to his room to retrieve something. When the boy returned, he pulled out the chair next to Derek's and sat himself down. Their knees brushed as the omega scooted closer.

"It's-" Stiles glanced up at Derek, pulling whatever he was holding away from where he was tightly clutching it to his chest "-not much." He held a satchel. It weighed heavily of the same beta scent that clung to the room Derek slept in, the clothes he wore—Stiles' father's.

Stiles popped the buckle on the satchel and reached in, pulling out a wooden box. He placed it on the table between them, reached inside the fold of linen covering his front to pull out a hidden key hanging from the thread around his neck. Derek's ears buzzed as he waited. Stiles gave a short pause, fingers light on the intricate frame of the box, key ready in hand. Derek heard the omega's nervous exhale before he slid the head into the lock, clicked it open, and lifted the lid.

Of all the things Derek was prepared to see, it wasn't this. Inside the box lay an arrangement of vials and little pouches, all of them filled with-

"Are those-"

"Seeds."

Derek's eyes sharply met Stiles'. "How?" he whispered, lifting a vial up against the glow of the table lantern. The sound of their cascade was beautiful—like uncooked beans in a tin. He couldn't look away. "How do you have these?"

"My father," is all Stiles said, eyes glued to the vial in Derek's hand.

Derek put it back suddenly. "This isn't possible."

"But it is." 

"It shouldn't be."

"It is."

"You could be killed for this."

Stiles didn't reply at first, simply adjusted the vials, running gentle, reverent touches over their distinctive lids. "I know," he quietly said, shutting the box. He met Derek's eyes, and the light of the lantern cast a glow in the omega's amber eyes, setting them aflame. It made Derek's breath hitch. "We can make it green again," Stiles whispered. Derek should have looked away or shook his head or fucking kissed him—anything to protect the omega from making plans for a future that could only disappoint him—but he did none of that, just gazed back at the boy who believed so unconditionally in the land and the rain and the world.

"The Rain Man and the Keeper of the Seeds," Stiles murmured, lips quirking. "It's got a certain ring to it, don't you think?"

Derek didn't smile, but it was certainly something close to it.

 

❀❀❀

 

Scott, though the son of the Colonel, didn't remind Derek of the boy's sire at all. He was a good kid, listened well enough and had a goofy smile. He didn't look much like his father, either.

Derek sat with Scott and Isaac on the porch, watching the boys while Lydia went in to help Stiles make second meal. Scott started getting fussy over the toy they were sharing and before Derek could process what was happening, he raised his little fist and socked Isaac right in the arm.

Stiles came out to the sound of Isaac's cries. He gave Scott a disappointed, knowing look before gathering Isaac up and taking him back into the house without a word. Scott returned to his toy, the last minute seemingly forgotten.

"You shouldn't hit your brother like that," Derek said without thinking. "You shouldn't hurt the people you love."

Scott didn't look up when he asked, with all the innocence of a child, "Then why does Daddy hit Stiles?"

Derek blinked.

Scott kept playing with his toy.

Derek turned and faced the garage, elbows perched on his knees, watching the twisting motion of Boyd's arm as he tightened a screw on the bike. He slowly lowered his face into his hands.  _Should have put a bullet in him when I had the chance._ Derek was angry with himself for failing Stiles, and swore to kill the Colonel before he left this place.

_Why are you leaving?_

He stood, what felt like hours later, took Scott's hand, and walked them inside for second meal. They all sat as normal, eating and talking and frowning sadly down at their bowls when all the food was gone, and when Derek had stepped back out of the house, instead of joining Boyd in the garage, he wandered out into the vastness of the desert, feet carrying him toward Town. Before he could change his mind, he started walking.

_Why are you running?_

Derek started planning.

 

❀❀❀

 

He stood in the stall, in front of a tray of rings, hoping one would stand out, to magically call to him like the sirens from Stiles' books, but, of course, none of them did, and so he just stood there, the people passing by all around him, as he continued to stare down at the selection, like an idiot, wondering what he had even been thinking.

"See som'in ya like?" the stall owner asked. Derek looked up and met a row of missing teeth. He grunted, looking back down.

His thoughts wandered. He was stupid to have believed Stiles, to trust that the Colonel wasn't after more than the land. He thought of the scar across Stiles' neck. He swore to himself he'd replicate every ounce of Stiles' pain back onto the Colonel—tenfold. Stiles deserved that much.

He wondered if Stiles cried. Maybe not. Stiles was proud. He wouldn't want to show any weakness. Stiles didn't just have the hint of desert-dwelling ancestry, but he seemed to know the Wasteland like the sky knows the sun—effortlessly, unconditionally, selflessly. He had fierceness in him, and the determination yielded from generations of families born under the scorching sun. Derek shook his head. Stiles definitely wouldn't have cried.

"So he told you about the weddings, did he?" Derek snapped his head to the side. Deaton evenly looked back at him. The old man plucked up a ring at random and examined it. "Am I wrong?"

Derek swallowed, parched from the journey, and shifted from one foot to the other. He said nothing.

Deaton appraised him for a moment, then plopped the ring back into the tray and began hobbling away. He paused when Derek didn't immediately follow him, and half-turned, nodding the alpha forward. "Let us talk, road warrior."

Derek's spine went stiff, and he took cautious steps forward, following the old man from a distance. They came to a stop in front of Deaton's hut, where Marin greeted them with a soft smile. She pulled the flap of the hut back. After a moment's hesitation, Derek walked in.

The interior of the hut was as meager as it looked from the outside. Whatever their trade, the old couple kept it well-hidden.

When Marin began speaking, Derek shifted closer so as not to miss anything important.

"It seems our boy is better at keeping secrets than we gave him credit for," she said, though her voice was more fond than anything else. "It's truly something that he's managed to hide you this long." She gestured for Derek to sit, and he obeyed, stiffly settling, though still overly cautious.

Marin chuckled. "You need not suspect us, wolf. What could two old raisins possibly do to you?"

"What's a raisin?" Derek said flatly.

Marin chortled. "I like this one," she said to no one in particular. Deaton visibly had to hold himself back from rolling his eyes, but Derek could hear the fondness in the man's snort even with his left ear's hearing already beginning to wane.

"Do you still carry your badge?" Deaton asked Derek, momentarily surprising the alpha.

Derek collected himself back into a mask of indifference. "No," he said shortly.

Deaton assessed him in that way he tended to do, and Derek sat there and let himself be assessed until Marin was forced to break the silence. "I take it Stiles told you about his deal with the Colonel."

Derek looked at her. "No." He gritted his teeth. "Not the truth, anyway."

Marin softly shook her head. She looked youthful from a distance, more so than she had up close that first time Derek had seen her. Maybe his eyesight was beginning to fail him, too.

"That boy," Marin muttered. "He just never listens." She patted her own hand. "Thinks of everyone but himself."

Deaton harrumphed, placing his hand over hers. "The wolf may be the answer," he quietly murmured, and Marin looked up, brows drawn together. "There is only one way Stiles can be saved now." Deaton met Derek's eyes. "And you know what that is, don't you, wolf?"

Derek swallowed, and Marin pulled away from her mate, standing. She looked at Derek, closing the distance between them, dark, wrinkled hand reaching out towards him. Derek forced himself to sit still. Her hand was not smooth, but it wasn't unkind and punishing, so Derek relaxed, and Marin pressed her palm to his rough cheek, searching Derek's eyes for something, and when she found it, she whispered, "Take care of our boy," turned away, and left the hut.

Deaton stayed seated as he watched his mate leave. "I'd always tell Stiles that we came together when the world was still okay, her and I," he said. "She wasn't anything I ever expected." He sighed, and it looked like it took great effort, chest rising and falling in slow, halted measures. "I'm sure you can imagine," he said offhandedly, hands on his knees as he rose.

The man turned his back to Derek and began rummaging through a chest. He pulled out a cloth, unraveling it to extract what was hidden within. When he turned back, Derek's throat tightened at seeing was the man was holding.

"Colonel Alan Deaton," he murmured, cradling the silver badge in his hand. He huffed. "Ironic, no?" Derek didn't say anything— _couldn't_. Deaton looked up, and he chuckled grimly at Derek's expression. "I know a soldier when I see one, wolf."

Derek looked away.

Deaton wrapped the badge back up in its cloth. He held it out to Derek. "A present."

"I don't want it."

"It's not for you."

Derek leveled a look at the older man.  _Stubborn_ _old crow._ He took the badge in its cloth and shoved it into his jacket.

"He wouldn't like any of them," Deaton stated at the mouth of the hut, holding the flap open for Derek.

Derek raised a brow in question.

"The rings," Deaton clarified. "It's better to wait and find the perfect one." He smiled as Marin approached from the stalls. He looked up at the alpha. "Tell me I won't have to worry about him."

Derek stepped out of the hut. He turned back. "I'll do right by him."

Deaton nodded, satisfied with the answer. "Pray for rain."

"Pray for rain."

"Be good to him," Marin pleaded as she stood by her mate. She smiled wistfully. "He always believed in the little things."

"And be careful, wolf," Deaton said in parting, gaze trained on the sky. "Something big is coming."

 

❀❀❀ 

 

What Deaton failed to mention was that the 'something big' was coming fast and hard and without mercy.

The house was within sight by the time the winds picked up in the distance, sand beginning to fly into the air, really starting to pelt his skin, a wave of red building on Derek's tail.

"He's here, Stiles!" Lydia's voice rose above the gusts building momentum. "He's here!"

He reached the porch in a matter of seconds, heart pounding in his ears, and Stiles threw open the door, pulling him inside. Boyd hauled the hatch shut, locking the regular door behind it. The room was dark, windows latched and barred, all sunlight cut off from reaching inside.

"What were you thinking?" Stiles hissed, and Derek stepped back, still catching his breath. "Are you a mad man? You're lucky the Jackals didn't catch you or you you'd be hanging by a rope off the Ridge right now getting flayed by this storm!"

Stiles was as breathless as Derek, cheeks flushed in anger and worry, the lamps and lanterns casting confused, messy shadows across his pale, anxious face, and Derek took a moment to chide himself for being so reckless, for leaving without saying anything— _And yet you'd still leave again_ _._

The children were huddled together in the main room, quiet and subdued, staring, waiting.

"Sorry."

Stiles blinked, taken aback, mouth opening and closing. He clicked it shut at last, arms crossed. Derek wondered when the last time was that someone apologized to him, for hurting him in any way, for doing him wrong. Perhaps no one ever had.

"I'm sorry." Derek awkwardly scratched at his beard. "I wasn't thinking."

Stiles stared up at him and huffed, turning away. "Don't do it again."

Erica waved Derek over. "We're learning about Icarus."

"He doesn't know what that means, Erica," Jackson remarked, rolling his eyes.

"Come and see," Erica said to Derek, shoving Jackson off a cushion, patting the open spot for the alpha to sit.

Stiles and the rest of the kids wiggled over, making room for Derek's hulking frame.

"Well?" Erica snapped her fingers, grabbing his attention. "You coming or not?"

Derek met Stiles' eyes.

He joined them.

 

❀❀❀

 

There was a thick atmosphere around him, the air stuffy and hot,  _too_ hot, even for Stiles, who had known nothing but desert since the day he was born. He wanted to dunk himself in cold, cold water, wash the haze and hurt away. There was an ache inside him that was building, refusing to be ignored. He lolled back against the sofa, devoid of the children who were all in bed now, watching the Rain Man's lips moving, forming words that Stiles was struggling to make out.

"-safe-"

"-care of you-"

"-only way-"

And then, suddenly, the Rain Man was right there. Stiles ran his fingers up his arm, onto his chest, feeling for the alpha's heat. He gripped the back of the Rain Man's neck, fingers twisting in his hair.

Then, with his final bit of strength, he pulled the Rain Man's face down toward his own. His head left the cushions. The Rain Man's skin was almost touching his, his mouth so close. Stiles felt the roughness of his beard, his warm breath, smelled the leather and gasoline, tasted the dirt and salt and sweat. The Rain Man's lips were startlingly soft against his.

His head thumped back against the sofa, eyes fluttering open, a rush of heat flooding through him, and the Rain Man gazed down at him with those deep green eyes, nostrils flaring.

"Marry me, Stiles."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand I'm back—as are weekly updates. Hope this chapter was worth the wait! Not too happy with how it turned out, but I'm pooped so let me know what you guys think. Thanks to everyone who left a comment/kudos, you guys seriously rock:-)
> 
> Tons of love, my little moonpies xx


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [**pluviophile** (n) - _let it rain_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rQoHOCFlko) ❀

Derek stared down at the photograph in his hand. Laura stared back. He rubbed his thumb over one corner, a habit, then quickly withdrew it, frowning down at the coin-sized smudge of discoloration by his sister's face.  _Would I still remember what you look like? If I didn't have this? Would I still see you so vividly when I shut my eyes?_ He folded the photograph into his pocket, going back to marking off the forty-second slit into his bedframe. Lydia walked in a heartbeat later.

"Why're you hiding in here?"

Derek gave her a look.  _Why do you think?_

Lydia rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, tossing her fiery hair back. "The storm isn't letting up. He's just as trapped as you are."

"It's different."

"Different how?"

"It just is."

"Stubborn mule."

Derek snorted, despite himself. He placed his knife on the night table. "I don't know what I'll do."

Lydia shifted. "What does that mean?"

"Means exactly what I said."

 _"What?"_  Lydia shook her head. "You think you'll force yourself on him?"

Derek shrugged. "Maybe. Is that not how they bred us to be? The people from the Old World? To follow our animal instincts, our carnal impulses?" He stood, towering over her. "You would know, with all the books Stiles has taught you to understand. What do they say about their creation? About us?" Lydia's jaw twitched. "What do they say about me?" She frowned then, and Derek looked away. "They say just that, don't they?"

Lydia grabbed him, and Derek's eyes snapped down to her hand. She gripped his arm tighter. "You _won't."_ She refused to release his gaze. "You won't hurt him."

Derek shook his head. "You don't know that," he said, but Lydia was having none of it. She lifted her chin, head high, and for a moment she reminded Derek of his sister—both of them—determined and unrelenting and too young to fear truth.

He wilted, rigged muscles going lax, catching himself on the edge of the bed. "I don't know if I'll be able to control myself," he admitted, and it scared him just saying it out loud.

Lydia uncrossed her arms. "It's up to you, Rain Man." She looked him over. "You wouldn't hurt him," she said. "You _can't._ That's just-" she shrugged, attempting nonchalance, but the softness in her voice gave her away "-not who you are."

She left.

Derek stayed in his room, locked away, distracting himself with the sound of the dust storm as Stiles' heat grew in intensity, the omega's voice and scent beckoning to him from a room away. The walls were not paper thin in any regard, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway because Derek's wolf senses had decided to come around and cooperate with him. Every smell and sound was magnified, every atom in his body growing more and more attuned to Stiles'. At the peak of the omega's heat, Derek had almost given in, driven insane by the sweet smell of the boy, and was ready to pull himself out of his trousers to jerk himself to completion when Lydia knocked and called him for third meal.

He didn't join them. He didn't trust himself.

Neither did Stiles.

And when he heard his name being gasped out, muffled into a pillow like the whisper of wind in the dead of night, it took everything in him not to rut against the mattress like some greeny. He'd sooner die of mortification than give in to temptation, and after short deliberation he considered that maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing. Death would probably feel like a skipped meal compared to this.

 

❀❀❀

 

"It's not there."

"If you haven't noticed, I can't exactly see."

"Do it blind, then."

_"Jackson."_

"Ugh," came Erica's groan, and the sound of feet shuffling back. "Let me." There was a thud and a scrape and a flame sparking to life in the pitch-black darkness. "It's a miracle you guys survived as long as you did," Erica said, and she lit the table lamp.

"Speak for yourself,  _Twitchy,"_  Jackson shot back, smug, offended face lit by the flickering lamplight. Boyd pushed him back, blocking Erica from making things physical. "Oh, that's just fresh," Jackson taunted over Boyd's shoulder. "Let the grease rat come to your rescue."

Derek walked into the room, large shadow engulfing the children. They grew quiet as he approached. Erica managed to sneak an elbow to Jackson's ribs, sticking her tongue out at him.

"Storm's over," Boyd said, stating the obvious. "Stiles is still in bed. We were gonna start shoveling without him." Kira walked over and took Derek's hand, tugging him toward the door.

The alpha had to put a little extra effort into pulling the hatch open. "Stand back," he gruffly said to the kids, and hauled it the rest of the way open. Sunlight shot into the house like a bullet, bright and blinding. The children took some time to adjust, squinting and shielding their eyes and looking away.

Derek inhaled the dry, overturned desert air, a sweet relief to his lungs. Though Stiles' heat had waned, the air inside the house was still dense with the built up pheromones of the last three days.

He kicked in the little wall of sand that had built up in front of the door, opening up the entryway, and stepped out. The kids loaded out after him, pulling on their sun covers, and they all got to work.

The sand hadn't packed in all too much considering the length of the storm, but it still took more than a while to clear it, especially where the garage was concerned. Boyd had covered the bike and the Jeep with a tarp, which was a small mercy amidst the rest of the crap that was now partly buried beneath random mounds of sand. The kids wandered back inside bit by bit, drained and overheated. Derek and Boyd were left to do the heavy lifting, clearing out the sand and stacking the water canteens and portion packages anew, making sure none of them had been spoiled. Derek paused to rest a moment, pulling the end of his shirt up to wipe the sweat and dust from his brow. He glanced over at the house and paused.

Stiles stood by the front door, arms wrapped around himself. He had forgone his usual linens and was wearing a plain white shift with itty straps that had Derek staring longer than usual.

"Hungry?" Boyd murmured on his way past the alpha, and Derek could practically _feel_ the smirk in his voice. He watched Stiles pull Boyd in by his cheeks, pale hands framing the boy's dark, sweaty face to look him over properly, fondly chucking his chin and sending him inside to wash up. He looked over at Derek and made a slight movement with his head, nodding towards the house. _Come eat._

Derek subtly inhaled, Stiles' scent wafting over him, and to his quiet relief, the tangy perfume of the omega's heat had subsided for the most part.

He nodded back, dropping his shovel.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

The tension in the air was little more than bearable as the day passed on and Stiles' heat faded back to his usual sweet scent. The omega was out pinning up a fresh batch of laundry on the line, dress softly lifting in the breeze. Derek forced himself away from the window, gathered himself enough to go talk to the boy. Stiles didn't hear as he approached, just stood with a shirt in his hands, unmoving. In his eyes was a ten-mile stare.

"Have you thought about what I said?"

Stiles startled, eyes snapping to Derek's. He quickly looked away, delaying his answer before quietly saying, "Yes."

Derek found himself distracted by the gentle rise and fall of the omega's chest, where his pale skin disappeared beneath his equally pale dress.

"And?"

"I-" Stiles glanced up at Derek again, just as quickly darting his eyes away, a flush staining his cheeks "-don't know." He pinned up the shirt in his hands. "It's a lot to think about."

Derek stepped closer. "It's the only way, Stiles."

"Because it could bring the rain."

"Because then the Colonel won't be able to take you when the rain _doesn't_ come."

Stiles' jaw clicked shut so fast Derek had to hold back a wince. The omega faced him. "What happened to leaving? Finding home? That's what you wanted, right?"

Now it was Derek's turn to clench his teeth. "I want-" he looked away, lowered his voice: "I want you to be safe."

When Stiles didn't reply, he looked back at the omega, and there was something sad in his eyes that Derek couldn't bear. 

Of course Stiles wouldn't be jumping up and down, sunbeams shooting out of his face in excitement. Stiles never wanted it like this, a mating as a means to an end. Derek was scarred and grisly and humorless. He was not simple. He was not an easy thing. He was more baggage than he was probably worth, so why would Stiles walk the winding path if it led to him? It only made sense that someone as fair and bright as Stiles would not want to be sullied by the likes of Derek.

When he spoke again, the resignation was palpable in his voice. "I won't mate you if you don't want it," he quietly assured.

_I think I will always want you. Even when I die. Especially then._

And he's frightened by that because, in Derek's experience, wanting something could never end in anything but disappointment. Stiles was the first thing he'd wanted since he set out to find home all those years ago.

Stiles suddenly stepped into Derek's space, and the alpha braced himself, looking down into those clear, amber eyes.

"I want," Stiles whispered, and the warmth of his breath radiated through every fiber of Derek's being. He said it again, urgently, breathlessly: "I _want."_

"You do?"

"Silly wolf."

Stiles smiled, and all Derek could think was, _Oh, shit._

 

❀❀❀ 

 

Kira placed a folded paper boat on Derek's knee.

"When you and Stiles are married can we visit an ocean?" she asked, nudging the boat upstream—up Derek's thick thigh. "I've never been." She nudged the boat further toward him, insistently. Derek held his palm out and she placed it there.

"When me and Stiles are married-" Derek's heart seized before he let himself promise anything, suddenly fearful he would let her down. Kira stared up at him with bright, inky eyes. When he didn't finish his sentence, she took his hand and folded his rough fingers in over her little boat. She patted his closed fist for good measure.

"When me and Stiles are married we can go to all the oceans," Derek told her, and he didn't stop himself because he truly meant it. "How about that?" Kira beamed. "Just to say that we did."

 

❀❀❀

 

It took some planning, but the wedding was finally underway.

The kids had strung up white bed sheets everywhere, using the clothing lines and the wooden porch to hang their fortress upright, airy linens swaying in the breeze, forming a soft backdrop. They positioned Derek at the foot of the stairs, where he was told to wait. The children sat at polar ends on the porch steps, half of them to the left, the other half on the right, forming a makeshift aisle, a small, quiet little audience gazing up at him as they waited for Stiles.

The breeze had really started to pick up that day, billowing the pinned sheets like sails on a ship, and it was made even more obvious when Stiles stepped through the front door and out onto the deck, linens and veil immediately shifting with the wind. Derek's mouth went dry as he took the omega in, and all the children turned to see. 

He was so beautiful Derek had to look away.

Only the sound of the wind in the sheets remained as Stiles walked to him. It was as if everyone in the whole world was holding their breath—including Derek. He forced himself to look up again when Stiles was halfway down the porch.

Their eyes met and it was like staring into the sun. Derek held his hand out, a gesture that came so naturally he couldn't even question it. Stiles' hand felt small in his, was engulfed by Derek's thick, calloused fingers. When Stiles stood in front of him, and Derek had to tilt his head down to meet his eyes through the thin, white veil, he took the omega's other hand, and the beating of Stiles' heart finally bypassed the ringing in his ears, flooding through. Their pulses were like tattoos, burning and beating into each other.

Erica cleared her throat:  _Focus._

Derek started: "Blood of my blood."

"Bone of my bone," Stiles said. "I give you my body-"

"-that we two might be one. I give you my spirit-"

"-'til our life shall be done."

Derek stepped closer. He swallowed, hesitated only a moment, and lifted the omega's veil back.

Stiles gazed up at him without pause, eyes bright and molten. Derek searched for words, for a way to make this easier, less about survival and more about having this moment as it should be had. "I know this isn't-" he furrowed his brows, upset with himself and the world "-the way you wanted this to happen for you."

Of all things to do, Stiles smiled. "I've got a secret," he said, and pressed onto his tiptoes, cupping the alpha's cheek to bring his lips close. His breath was warm on the shell of Derek's ear when he whispered, "I dreamt we fell in love."

He cupped the other side of Derek's face, fingers running through the alpha's coarse beard, tilting his face down toward his own.

"Kiss me, Rain Man."

And so Derek did.

 

❀❀❀

 

"I hate it," Stiles whispered, Derek's thumb tracing the edge of the scar on his neck. "Please." He squeezed the hand Derek had on his hip. "It's ugly."

_Nothing about you could be ugly._

Derek made a low, reassuring noise in the back of his throat. He couldn't bear to see Stiles hurt like this, but Derek didn't think he could cause him more pain—even to remove the lingering evidence of the Colonel.

"It'll hurt," he reminded Stiles, brushing the omega's cheek, cradling the side of his face.

"I've had worse," the boy remarked casually, but Derek hated the words because he knew they were true. "Please," Stiles whispered again, and Derek's hands dropped, held the side of omega's neck. He leaned in, breath hot on Stiles' skin, and the boy shivered as Derek held him.

He bit down where the soft dip of the boy's neck met the curve of his shoulder, covering the scar Stiles hated so much, jaw locking, and emotions were suddenly running so swiftly and deeply through him that it pained him to pull away only a few heartbeats later. He kissed the place where his teeth had sunk in, red staining his lips, and lapped the slight trickle of blood right up, pulling away, fearful that it had been too painful, too much.

But then Stiles' hand was on the back of his neck, pulling him in for another kiss, and it was only when they came apart for air that Derek realized that the omega hadn't made a single sound of pain at all.

 

❀❀❀

  

The mating mark on Stiles' neck was still fresh, the children's cheers not yet died down, when the shadow of that first cloud peeked out over the house, dark and stormy and such a contrast to the clear, pale blue that made up the other half of the desert sky. The sun was still out at the opposite end of the valley. The clouds rolled in, casting an odd, ethereal glow upon everything the light touched from afar.

The rain came suddenly—not that a warning would have been any less shocking.

It was the strangest feeling, pelting Derek's skin, ice cold— _I'm here! I'm happening!_ _—_ and yet he couldn't process it.

_It's raining. It's raining. I'm mated to Stiles and it's raining._

He looked over at the boy—arms out, head tilted back, eyes closed, skimpy linens already soaked through as he twirled around, taking it all in.

"Derek," he heard himself say, voice rising above the downpour, and Stiles stopped, turned back to look at him, breathless and smiling brighter than the sun ever could.

_Hope is not a mistake._

"My name is Derek."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATED FAST AF CUS I LOVE YOU BITCH Y YOU DO THIS TO ME
> 
> Couple things:  
> 1\. Edited tags! Edited that long-ass summary! Kinda! Edited music links! EDITS FTW!  
> 2\. I was having a hard time trying to write up wedding vows that sounded okay, and I just ended up borrowing the ones I heard on the show _Outlander_. Coolio.  
>  3\. HOLY MOLY HONEY WE MARRIED THE KIDS
> 
> Drop a comment and let me know what you think! (Translation: I thrive off validation)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [this is another green world](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhoztJlPJfs) ❀

_My mate has a name._

Stiles scarcely slept and woke up still smiling.

_Derek._

 

❀❀❀

  

The rain didn't stop.

They formed a plan for when the Colonel would inevitably pay them a visit. Derek was prepared for a fight, health completely renewed as opposed to the last time he had glimpsed the sick fuck himself. But they had a plan. They had a plan that didn't make him any less tense, and three days into the downpour, everyone around him was walking on eggshells.

"You should be more afraid," Derek had said.

"I'm not," Stiles replied.

"You should be."

_"I'm not."_

Then, over the sound of the rain, in the distance: the roar of engines.

Derek and the children climbed up into the bunk like last time, silent and hidden. Stiles greeted the Jackals out on the porch, shotgun casually leaned up by the door. He wore his linens all the way up to his neck, covering his scar—whether it was out of habit or to hide the new mating mark, Derek wasn't sure. Stiles was smart. It was probably best that they didn't shove it in the Colonel's face right away. He held his breath.

The Colonel's boots heavily hit the sand. He took his time in approaching the house. Derek didn't dare to peek out the bunk's window.

"Well, isn't this an interesting development?" the Colonel coolly remarked. Derek tried to focus in on Stiles' heartbeat, but the rain was too loud against the roof, the ringing in his ears fading in and out at irritating intervals.

"A blessing," Stiles corrected.

The Colonel laughed. "Is it, now?" _Patronizing son of a bitch_. "What kind of a blessing fucks the king of the desert over?"

Derek tightened his grip on his gun, pulling it from his jacket. He gave the kids a reassuring glance as they huddled together in the corner, barricaded between their mattresses.

"The rain feeds the land and the people," Stiles steadily replied, voice unwavering, and for a brief moment, fondness bubbled up inside Derek's chest.  _Knew you were a brave one._ "Is that not what we all wish for?"

The Colonel's laugh echoed despite the storm. No other sounds, and then his feet were moving again, sloshing against the drenched sand and mud.

The sound of Stiles scraping the shotgun up into his hands.

_Give me the signal._

"You're not welcome here," Stiles said, shotgun's barrel clicking into place, making the Colonel stop in his tracks. "Don't tell me you're here to go back on your word? What kind of honorable man does that?" The sound of the Jackals' firearms went up, magazines being loaded, safeties going off. Derek gritted his teeth.

_Signal me._

"We had a deal."

_Signal me._

"We did."

_Stiles._

"Don't hurt yourself, little dove."

He couldn't believe his ears.

The Colonel's feet retreated, the engines revving, and the Jackals and their king tore off in their rigs, back across the desert.

Derek's heart was still pounding away in his ears when the last car swerved off, the children scrambling down the ladder. When Derek didn't follow them, Stiles poked his head up into the bunk and climbed through.

Derek stood on unsteady legs, gun still in hand, adrenaline pumping, and strode toward Stiles in two steps. "What did you do?"

Stiles frowned. "Wow. Right to it, huh?"

"We had a plan."

Stiles rolled his eyes. "He would've flipped his shit if he knew you even existed."

"We had a plan.  _You follow the plan."_

"Well, I didn't! What are you going to do, punish me?"

Derek recoiled. "Why would you say that?"

"Guess it's just what I'm used to," the omega muttered, looking down.

Derek stared at Stiles—at his mate—and sighed. "Why do you insist on putting yourself at risk?"

"Because that's what people do when they care about someone." Stiles met Derek's gaze, shrugging like it should be obvious. It'd been so long since Derek had anyone do that— _care_ about him—that he forgot what it entailed.

"If he knew you and I had mated-" Stiles' hand unconsciously reached for the bite mark on his neck "-he'd take me. He wouldn't even care about the deal because I broke it before he could."

Now it was Derek's turn to look away, cursing under his breath. "He wouldn't just give you up this easily," he darkly groused. "I don't believe him."

"Why would he lie?"

"Why _wouldn't_ he?"

Stiles threw his hands up, as exasperated as Derek felt. "He _left!_ He drove away! What more could you want?"

"I don't trust him," Derek growled, and moved around the omega to climb down.

"Nobody trusts anyone," Stiles said, letting him go. "That's the problem."

Derek refused to be swayed by Stiles' reasoning. But the boy knew the Colonel well, more than Derek wanted to admit, so Derek took it upon himself to storm away and sulk in his own miserable paranoia, far from where Stiles would be able to fear what Derek feared.

Stiles deserved safety, protection from a wolf—a true alpha—that wasn't broken, half-deaf, haunted by his ghosts. Stiles deserved the love he kept trying to give everyone else.  _I'd give you the world,_ Derek thought.  _But you deserve so much more than that._ He shook his head, Laura's voice ringing in his ears.  _Maybe if I was more. Maybe if I was enough._

Derek didn't believe in anything, so he looked at everything with the same indifference. Having this, building a life here with Stiles, was not any more or any less ludicrous than the idea of rain or a god that lived in the sky.

But Stiles believed. There was so much that Derek couldn't give him, and the thought of letting him down, of not being good enough, was almost worse than not trying at all. The stars and the rain and the dreams that Stiles saw, Derek wanted to see them, too. He wanted to believe in something as much as Stiles believed in everything. And he kind of did, didn't he?

He believed in Stiles.

 

❀❀❀

  

Around Town, Derek officially became known as Stiles' hired hand. 

Rumor had it that he slept in the garage, where he worked on the omega's Jeep day and night, trying to breathe life into the engine that once roared across the desert flats, pale and icy blue, like a star shooting across the sky. It was half-true—at least the part about Derek slaving over the Jeep. And slave over it he did, going so far as to say that she would be up and running in no time.

Stiles would see him working tirelessly out there late into the night, then bright and early at dawn, and almost always bare-chested, sweaty and hyper-focused. "Crazy man," Erica would say, shaking her head with a sly grin. But Stiles couldn't really complain. Seeing a piece of his mother, a piece of himself being revived like that—it wasn't unwelcome in the least.

And being mated was not what Stiles thought it would be. Then again, their mating was a most unconventional one. He wasn't sure what he had expected to come of them after the Colonel left them alone. Their relationship hadn't really developed beyond that first kiss at the wedding, and sometimes Stiles found himself daydreaming about it, wanting other things, wanting more, growing wet between his legs when he lay in bed at night, as he often did when he thought about the alpha sleeping just a room away.

It was not what he had dreamed of, but it wasn't... _bad._

Derek had known what Stiles wanted, however childish and silly it was, and still he had offered it, a way to protect Stiles, to keep him safe. Stiles couldn't fault him for that. But it wasn't the first time he wished things could have worked out differently. The rain had come, and now they were mated, in vain as it may have been. Stiles wouldn't let himself mourn the death of another dream, though. The circumstances that brought them together were not the most poetic, but Stiles believed that he and Derek could build something together, here in their little corner of the world. Perhaps Stiles could love him. He was so different and wild. When the light made Derek's bare skin glow on those early mornings, he was the most beautiful thing Stiles had ever seen.

But maybe Derek didn't want him back. Maybe Derek was just a good man, a man who helped and saved and sacrificed and expected nothing in return.

Maybe Derek was lost.

Stiles wanted to find him.

 

❀❀❀

 

The rain called it quits too soon for Stiles' preference, but Derek didn't particularly mind. The rain made the children sniffle and sneeze, and Stiles said that that was what happened when people got cold.  _Cold._  Derek had huffed, reminded again of the magic Stiles possessed. Derek had never experienced cold climate before, and now that the land was wet and quenched and cool, he realized it didn't really affect him all that much anyway, what with the wolf blood running through his veins.

When the storm cleared and the sun shined once more, Stiles introduced Derek to the tractor in the shed, a standard motor that apparently went back a couple generations in the family. Didn't take much to start her up, but once she was going, boy, she was  _going._ Derek only paused to take a break when he glanced up from where he was plowing the field and saw Stiles lounging out on the porch, head knocked back—asleep. The kids were running around a couple yards out front, slinging mud at each other. Derek sighed and cut the engine.

"Wasn't this your idea?" he loudly questioned as he walked up, and Stiles flailed himself awake.

The omega rubbed at his eyes. "Sure it was."

"Weren't we gonna start planting?"

"Definitely."

Derek raised a brow. 

"We will! Just let me take a break." Stiles pillowed his head in his arms, reclining again. Derek watched the fan of the omega's dark lashes against his pale, speckled cheeks for a moment before letting him be. Stiles liked to do things at his own pace, which was fine and all that, but Derek discovered pretty early on that the boy also had a knack for procrastination.

He was at the end of the field, sweating and grunting his way through digging up a large rock embedded in the soil when a shadow fell over him. "Break over?" he asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. Stiles ignored him and reached out to run his fingers through Derek's damp, matted hair. It grew back during the weeks he'd been here but not nearly long enough to bother him.

"I can cut it," Stiles said, not so much a suggestion as it was a request. Derek glanced down at his dirt-covered hands, sand stuck under his nails, the stubborn boulder still snuggly immersed in the dirt. Stiles' priorities were just as confusing as the rest of him. "I'll be quick," the omega said. "I'll bring out the seeds afterward." The promise lured Derek in, and he squinted up at Stiles for a moment before grunting to show his surrender.

Stiles sat him on the lowest porch step, then took up position a level behind him, shears in hand, legs spread around Derek's middle. He worked diligently, with an experience that must've come from cutting the kids' hair over the years, and quietly—a contrast to his usual running mouth. Derek couldn't completely relax with a blade so close to his skull and neck, but Stiles' hands were gentle, as they always were, and soon enough there was more hair in the dirt than there probably was on his head.

Stiles stood and came around to Derek's front. He raked his fingers through the alpha's hair, then softly tugged on the strands behind his ears, making sure they had been trimmed evenly. He nodded to himself, then haphazardly ran his fingers down through Derek's beard. "I like this," he said approvingly, grinning, then pulled away, leaving it untouched. He jogged up into the house and returned with the box of seeds.

"I stayed up a couple nights ago to plan the field out," he said, lifting the lid and pulling out the fattest sack. "Wheat goes first."

Derek stared down at it. How could something so little become something so great?

"It's what my family grew." Stiles set the box aside. "We'll plant others, too, of course. Fruits, nuts—all of it." He thrust the wheat out to Derek. "Here."

Derek took it. He stood there for a moment, weighing it in his hand. "You're nervous," he observed, the flutter of Stiles heartbeat loud and clear.

"I'm hopeful."

"But you're scared."

"I'm not scared of anything."

"It'll work."

Stiles looked up, lips parting. Derek's cheeks warmed. Who would've thought that he would be the one reassuring Stiles that the seeds would take and grow?

"You think so, Rain Man?" Stiles smiled from ear to ear.

Derek didn't know how to respond, so he turned and walked them back to the tractor. Boyd helped him hook up the seed drill.

"It's gonna be so  _green,"_ Kira giggled, shaking with uncontainable excitement. Erica beamed next to her, smiling so big Derek thought her cheeks would split.

"We won't have to worry about portions anymore," Lydia said, something like realization and relief in her voice.

"Or water." Jackson nodded toward the huge barrels by the garage, full to the brim with fresh rainfall.

"We'll have so much food in the house!" Scott was bouncing out of his skin, tugging on Kira's sleeve, her little shadow.

The kids went back to slinging mud, running off again, leaving Stiles and Derek alone once more. Derek didn't know what was running through his head when he decided to say, "You never know—maybe one day we'll be storing food for more than just us."

A crease formed between Stiles' brows. "Why?" His eyes lit up. "You think we'll find more kids?"

"That's-" Derek snorted and shook his head "-not exactly what I meant." He was sure Laura would be laughing if she wasn't already dead and withering away in the scorched shell of their childhood home.

Stiles flushed a moment later, averting his eyes, understanding, and Derek climbed up into the tractor to hide the warmth in his own cheeks.

Not that he was. Blushing. Nope.

Not Derek.

 

❀❀❀

 

Weeks passed.

Not moving was still new for Derek. Not moving meant rest, shelter, time to talk—the latter being the most difficult concept to wrap his head around. The world wasn't built for the old ways, and life had gone so backwards that the normalcy of Stiles' seemed crazy to Derek. 

Derek didn't remember how to talk, so he listened. Stiles knew compassion, knew talking, was the owner of smarts given to him by his parents and Marin and Deaton, who taught him how to read about the Old World. Stiles told him all about how Deaton's hut used to be filled from floor to ceiling with books. He'd given them all to Stiles over the years. It explained the emptiness of the hut. All that Deaton and Marin had was their knowledge of how the world died, a firsthand account forever fixed in their heads. And each other. They had each other. Derek didn't think it was the worst way to live.

"How'd you end up with them?" Derek asked in the main room one night, leaned up against a sofa. "The kids?" Stiles always managed to pull more than a few monosyllabic words from him. Sometimes he even succeeded in having Derek initiate the conversation.

Stiles laughed to himself, and his face glowed brighter against the lamp light. "It started with Scott, for obvious reasons." He flicked a grain of sand across the floor. "Scott was supposed to be the Colonel's alpha heir, a wolf, but his mother was poisoned during the pregnancy. The Colonel paid her, but he had enemies, and as Scott grew older it was clear that the pregnancy hadn't gone as well as he thought." Stiles took a breath, and Derek could faintly hear his heartrate speed up. "So the Colonel had him dumped off in the foothills, hoping the coyotes would get to him." Derek clenched his fists.  _Lower than scum._ "I heard his screaming," Stiles whispered, eyes glazed over as if he was reliving it in his head. "I don't know how, but-" he swallowed "-he didn't have a single scratch. He was all alone, crying his little lungs out." Anger etched into his face again. "Everyone is expendable to him," Stiles spat. "Even his own son." The anger subsided some. "I found Boyd a few months later. I didn't really think, just brought him back home with me. He was sick, he needed me, that was all that mattered."

"Where did he come from?"

Stiles thought on it for a moment. "I asked, once. He didn't tell me, and I never brought it up again. He was so much more quiet than he is now, believe it or not. He left something bad behind, and that was all I needed to know. And the others, well, Jackson and Lydia were orphaned and taken in by Deaton and Marin for a while, and Erica was a little thief in the market. Found them all about a year after Boyd. Kira was a spectacle at the Pass, chained to a post like an animal. I looked at her, this little girl, thirsty and stick-thin with the brightest smile I'd ever seen, and asked her why she was put there, and..." Stiles trailed off. "She said her parents didn't want her anymore because there was something inside her, something bad, like a demon. It broke my heart." Derek felt heavy in the chest. "She was so happy to come home. She didn't let it hurt her, what her parents did. That was the same place I found Isaac a couple months ago. I saw the bruises, and I just knew. He used to get bad dreams all the time. He still does once in a while, I think, but he doesn't like to tell me. He says I worry too much." Stiles let out a soft breath. Derek assumed they had gotten to the end, when Stiles suddenly said, "There was a girl."

He was staring into the lamp. "Allison. Her parents were bounty hunters. They worked for the Colonel. They left one day without saying anything. They were gone for months before I brought her home with me. My father had been dead only days." Stiles' voice went rough, and Derek didn't want to look at him because he knew he would see tears. "I guess that was the real beginning. She couldn't have been any older than me, maybe a little younger, even. I guess I just wanted a friend," he said, and it killed Derek to hear how Stiles had to suffer. "She wandered out to the rundown in the south one day, the same one you came from. I warned her." His voice trailed off again. "Sometimes I think she did it on purpose," he brokenly whispered, and Derek felt his throat tighten. There was another pause before Stiles continued, and when he spoke again his voice was barely even a whisper. "I couldn't save her."

Derek reached out his hand and placed it on Stiles' knee. He held it there, warm and grounding. Perhaps it was how sad Stiles was. Maybe it was because his words sounded like Derek's, when he couldn't sleep at night and he'd play back his sister's voice in his head.

Before he could change his mind, Derek reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded cloth. He handed it to Stiles. 

The room was deathly quiet as the omega unraveled it. He stared at the badge in his lap for a moment, and Derek felt both deaf  _and_  blind when he couldn't hear nor scent out how Stiles was feeling.

"How do you have this?"

Derek cleared his throat. "Deaton gave it to me," he said. "A wedding present."

Stiles looked up at him, and the tears spilled over. Derek wanted to fold him into his arms and hide him away from all the hurt. Before he could take it back, from his pocket he pulled another badge, smaller, rounder, in way worse shape. He placed it in Stiles' lap.

"You're-"

"Road warrior."

Stiles didn't move, and then he was laughing, throwing his head back and baring the length of his pale neck to Derek's eyes. "I knew it." He turned his head and smiled at Derek once more, despite his tears. The flush in his cheeks was doing things to Derek. "I knew it all along, Rain Man." He slid over and pressed his side to Derek's, cradling Derek's badge in his hands like a treasure. "I'm mated to a soldier," he murmured, and Derek felt the corner of his lips tilt up. "Will you tell me about it?"

Derek softly sighed. "Maybe one day." Without thinking, he curled his arm around the omega, holding him close, and he was prepared for Stiles to tense up or pull away, but the boy just sunk back into Derek's warmth and ran his fingers over Derek's badge and sighed, troubles seeming to float away.

Stiles was in every crevice of Derek's mind. He'd smarted and smiled and laughed his way in, and Derek was afraid that he was losing his heart to his mate.

He wanted to laugh. Under the right circumstances, that would be a good thing.

 

❀❀❀

 

"And _then,"_ Erica said, "he warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun-"

"But also not too close to the sea," Kira added.

"Right. But Icarus  _did_ fly up too high and the sun melted the wax."

"And the feathers came apart."

"And Icarus fell into the sea."

Derek thought on this for a moment. "Why didn't he listen?"

"There's a word for it. Stiles, what's the word?" Erica asked over her shoulder.

"Hubris," Stiles answered, chasing after a naked, mud-covered Isaac. "Over-confidence. Blinding pride."

"That." Erica rifled through the shelf for another book, this one less thick. Derek didn't know how to read, but Erica found it enjoyable to recant everything Stiles taught her. "This is the story of Peter Pan," she began, opening up to the first page. "He's a boy who never grows up."

It became routine. The children would take turns reading to Derek before they went to bed. Sometimes they'd request Stiles to read. After bedtime, Derek occasionally found himself leaning over a page, Stiles teaching him letters and then words. After a while, he began to join Isaac and Scott as Stiles taught them during the day. His face warmed the first time he joined them at the table during a lesson, but Stiles didn't laugh at him or anything, and the kids were more than happy to have him.

The days went by without any sign of green. Stiles wasn't worried, so Derek wasn't worried. And the kids were always brimming with excitement. It'd be so pretty to say the children believed in the seeds in the same way Stiles believed in the rain and the land. But the truth was, the children believed in the seeds the way Derek believed in Stiles.

He caught Stiles in the early morning, before they had even had first meal.

The omega was crouched out in the middle of the field. Derek walked towards him. When he was but a few feet back, he stopped.

"Look," Stiles whispered.

_I am._

"Look at it." Derek couldn't see his face, but he knew Stiles was smiling.

The sprout was tiny, not nearly what Derek had expected. But it was leafy and alive and so green it hurt Derek's eyes.

Stiles stood and threw himself into Derek's arms, hugging the alpha close, burying his face in Derek's chest as he laughed. "It's alive," he gasped out. _"It's alive."_

Derek held him, and he smiled into the boy's hair, the sun rising over the Ridge.

"They don't call me Rain Man for nothing."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in case anyone forgot, road warriors = the last soldiers sent out to maintain order before the federal government collapsed.
> 
> I don't know anything about guns.  
> I don't know anything about farming.  
> Send help.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [you are my everything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cYPCk5PPV8) ❀

He woke in a sweat. Fifth time in a week, not so much about the ghosts anymore—no, not the night terrors—but about pining after the impossible. The dreams left him waiting—for what, Derek wasn't quite sure. Perhaps for them to become reality, or for the darker hallucinations to take over. He wasn't used to craving sleep. Sleep had always been a losing battle, but now Derek welcomed it, savored the sweetness until the dreams dissipated too soon into the morning light. That was one thing he had bitterly learned—that waking from a sweet dream pained the heart more than a nightmare.

 _How do I look at you?_ he'd think every time he and Stiles were in the same room, eyes on the floor, the wall, anywhere but on the omega who now haunted his every waking moment—even his sleeping ones. _How do I pretend I don't want you when I've tasted you in my dreams? When I've known the way your softness would feel against my body, the sounds you'd make with my mouth on you, making you come undone?_

These fucking dreams—Stiles, with his facts and his hope and his smiles and his laugh and his eyes and the way he'd manage to wind Derek up by doing absolutely _nothing_.

_You come to me in the night._

Stiles—sharp and so, so clever.

_You move through my dreams like they belong to you._

Stiles—who believed in rain and weddings and falling in love.

_They do._

 

❀❀❀

 

The coyotes grew particularly fond of their own howls as the first summer moon climbed into the sky. Stiles enjoyed howling back occasionally, just so they'd know he was still there. They were his first friends, crying out into the night as far back as he could remember, comforting him until he fell asleep, especially after his father died. The fact that the smallest coyote would be able to tear the head off a jackal was a comforting thought, he supposed. Maybe one day they'd come down and meet him face to face, when the land was real green and Stiles could spoil them with ripe fruits and the like.

Another howl in the distance, bouncing off the walls of the Ridge. The kids threw their heads back and howled in turn, the night lighting up beneath the glow of the full moon. When Stiles peeked his eyes open, he saw that Derek had his head thrown back, too.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

"What's this?"

Derek shrugged, placing the little contraption down on the porch. Stiles steered it out of Isaac's grabby hands. "Deaton said it takes pictures."

Stiles blinked up at the alpha. "He said what?"

"It takes-"

"It's a camera!"

Jackson and Erica lunged for it at the same time, biting and scratching to get to it first. Boyd managed to pluck it up amidst the scuffle, handing it to a patiently waiting Lydia.

Stiles was smiling big. "We can use it to keep track of our progress," he said, nodding towards the field. Derek shrugged, pushing his sleeves up to his elbows, exposing solid wrists and strong forearms. Stiles watched the expanse of Derek's back, the stretch of his shirt over his broad shoulders, as the alpha retreated to the irrigation ditch he was working on. The afternoon was humid with the rain clouds rolling in again, though they still hovered at the edge of the valley. Derek's loosely hanging hands were big and sturdy like the rest of him. Stiles swallowed. Derek could probably scoop up the entirety of the desert with those hands.

"If you stare any harder you might burn a hole through him," Jackson muttered on his way into the house. Stiles snapped his eyes away, cheeks warming. He pulled Isaac into his lap and buried his face into the boy's curls. When he glanced up again, Derek was watching him. He looked away first, skin heating, and for once it wasn't because of the desert sun or sand.

 

❀❀❀

 

"'You are'-" Derek frowned down at the paper "-'cor-cord-cordi-al'-"

"Cordially invited." Kira took the paper back and recycled it to Stiles, also a guest.

"Tonight," Erica said.

"Third meal, hosted by the girls," Lydia explained. "Don't be late." She raised a knowing brow at Derek.

"That's what you're gonna wear?" Boyd snorted, watching as Derek ran a wet hand through his hair and over his grimy face.

Derek grunted. "It's what I always wear. What's wrong with it?"

Boyd hopped down from the Jeep. He rummaged through some boxes near the water canteens until he found what he was looking for. He pulled out a fairly well-worn pair of dark jeans and a henley without any stains or holes in it. He tossed them at Derek. "You should probably take a bath first. When was the last time you had one of those?"

Derek grunted again and pulled his shirt over his head.

The girls were late in preparing the meal, despite their insistence for everyone else to gather on time. Derek sat himself awkwardly on the sofa, waiting to be directed to the table. Isaac and Scott crawled into his lap with a book as they waited, and Derek was only one page in, stumbling over a lengthy word, when Stiles made his entrance from the hallway.

Derek's breath caught somewhere in his throat. Stiles was wearing a dress, one Derek hadn't seen before, and his hair was slightly damp, the subtle smell of soap wafting off him. He smiled brightly as Isaac climbed off the couch and barreled over to him, and the omega lifted him into his arms to plant a wet kiss on the boy's cheek. Derek was still looking at him when Lydia called them all to the table, placing the last dish down.

It was hard to focus on the food, which was delightful and filling and must've come as a result of lots of bartering in Town considering the extra bread portions and sweet puddings towards the end, but Derek's head was filled with nothing but the omega sitting across from him, who was flushed and laughing and looking so warm and soft in the combined lighting of the waning sun and lamps and candles, skin glowing, soft and delicate-

 _No,_ Derek corrected himself— _not delicate._ Delicate was the one thing that Stiles Stilinski was not. He was singing to and reading to and raising the children in the middle of the Wasteland. He was howling back at the coyotes at the stroke of midnight. He was the reverberating echoes of a gunshot, ricocheting off of the steeply sloping sides of the Ridge. He was a dream-mist on bare skin in the driest depths of the desert. He was the heat of the unforgiving sand, the rage of the billowing red storms. Derek had known delicate things to be soft and comforting and pretty, and Stiles was all those things—but he was not delicate.

He was breathtaking. He was wild and strong and brave. He was light and water and air—he was everything Derek needed to live another day. He was the most beautiful thing Derek had ever laid his eyes upon.

He was Derek's very heart.

 

❀❀❀

 

Erica was grinning from ear to ear as she pulled out a big, black disk from the bookshelf. She arranged it in the wooden box on legs, adjusted the needle, and suddenly, music flooded the room, upbeat and jovial. Derek was entranced. 

"Let's dance," Erica said giddily, cheeks pink, blonde hair wildly spilling over her shoulders as she spun around. She latched onto Derek's hands, pulling him toward the center of the floor.

"I don't know how to dance," Derek said plainly, feet firmly planted.

Erica rolled her eyes, tugging him forward again. "Neither do I!"

They spun in circles mostly, and Erica tired herself out pretty quickly by doing cartwheels and jumping around with her siblings. Isaac and Scott were the first to conk out, of course, and the rest of them drifted up to the bunk for bed, one by one. Stiles and Derek stood across from each other once Boyd and Lydia bid them goodnight, candlelight casting dreamy, dim shadows across their bodies, the summer sun just beginning to set out on the horizon. Stiles smiled shyly and walked over to the record player, replacing the disk with another. This time, the melody was slow and soft, sensuous. When Stiles looked up, Derek was watching him, waiting.

It didn't take much coaxing for Derek to dance this time around—none, in fact—and Stiles found this amusing, softly laughing into Derek's shoulder as the alpha pulled him in by the hips, large hands warm and heavy on Stiles' middle, cradling his waist. Stiles wrapped his hands around Derek's neck, and as his laughs died down, he lifted his head slightly, forehead brushing against Derek's temple as they softly swayed in place. He pulled back further, looking up at the alpha, waiting. Must have said something, asked a question, and Derek didn't hear. Wouldn't be the first time it happened. Derek grunted, embarrassed, but Stiles simply repeated himself louder: "Do you have a family?"

Derek sighed, somehow afraid to look at the omega. "Did." He didn't want to talk about how they all burned with the rest of the world, about how Laura, if she was still out there, was the only family he had left, and how memories of her haunted him night and day. And as much as he hated how openly the omega looked at him, without judgment or disgust, making Derek feel raw and exposed, Stiles was here right now—real and beautiful and unafraid—and the longer he was here, the more Derek didn't want to let him go. He knew he had to say something or the omega would assume he'd never explain. 

"I'm looking for my sister," he said. "I've been looking for her for a long time. She was a road warrior like me, dispatched out here. I was deployed back east."

Stiles searched his face for a moment. "How long has it been?"

"Before the Last War."

_"Before?"_

"Yes."

"That was fifteen years ago."

"And I was fifteen years old."

"You were a _kid."_

"Well, when it ended I wasn't anymore, so."

Stiles stared at him, and for a moment Derek regretted saying anything at all, but then Stiles was shaking his head, jaw clenching. "You were a child. And they did that to you. They made you into a weapon."

Derek fixed his gaze over the boy's head. "We were all supposed to be together. Laura and I were going to be the last ones to meet my family. I got a call from her the day before it all ended. She told me they were gone, that the bay was dust. They were all dead. The last thing she said was, 'Mark time, brother, mark time. I'll see you soon.'" Derek blinked down at the omega and swallowed. "She meant, 'I'll be waiting for you.'"

The music kept playing in the background, their movements paused. "I'm sorry," Stiles whispered, gently cupping Derek's cheek. Derek had no choice but to meet his gaze. The omega's hand was soft and lovely, his fingertips tracing the stubble on Derek's jaw. He smelled like the sun and sky. He smelled like the sand, warm and real and everywhere. Derek wanted to pin him down and know him inside out.

"Why do you look at me that way, Rain Man?" Stiles murmured, pressing their foreheads together.

_Brush it off, shake it away, the dust of my life before this—the life I lived without you._

"You make me-" Derek pushed forward, pulled Stiles in, pressed their fronts together, tilted his head down and held his breath "-fucking crazy." 

His eyes slipped shut as Stiles curled his fingers into the fabric of Derek's shirt and tentatively kissed his mouth. It was tender and timid in its clumsiness, but then it occurred to Derek that the omega had only ever shared a kiss with one man before him, and the Colonel most certainly did not bother wasting time in being on the receiving end of things because he so loved to just _take._ The fleeting thought angered Derek, and he seized Stiles tighter around the waist, surged down to properly kiss him.

"No one else-" Stiles suddenly pulled away gasping, as if reading Derek's mind. "It was you, my first." He pressed their lips together again for emphasis. "All of it will be you, all of me."

Derek felt the boy shiver and suck in one last sharp breath before Derek dove back in. His tongue parted the omega's lips, coaxing a sweet, startled moan from him, and Derek swallowed it up. Stiles dug his hands into Derek's shoulders as Derek wrapped his arms around the boy and lifted him up, and Stiles urged them backward, down the hall, to his bed.

The omega gasped, spine arching, head tilting back as Derek laid him across the bedding, pulling his shirt over his head. Derek felt more of an animal than ever, so massive and monstrous in his appetites, mounting this lovely creature he had sprawled out beneath him. He descended, draping his large body over the youth, fitting himself into the cradle of the omega's legs, and said, "Tell me if you want me to stop," against Stiles' mouth, and the boy's  _no_ came out urgent and earnest before Derek all but devoured him, thumbs on his cheeks, deepening their kiss with every touch and gasp, big arms flexing to hold himself up.

Stiles' fingers gripped the muscle of his back and shoulders, followed the trails of jagged scars. "What-" he gasped, and Derek crushed their lips together again, chasing away the ghosts.

"Bad places," Derek rasped. He buried his face in Stiles' neck, pressed his rough cheek and mouth to the soft, warm skin there, grounding himself. "Bad people." He'd associated himself in utilitarian terms for so long that Derek had forgotten what it was like to be looked at any other way. And now he suddenly had a mate—someone who saw Derek's body as Derek's body and not just as a weapon or target. Stiles lifted a hand to cup the back of Derek's head, squeezing his shapely, pale legs tighter around Derek's waist, as if to hold him there in case Derek tried to pull away, to run from this. Derek's lips trailed across the omega's jaw, down over the mating bite on Stiles' neck. He wasn't the only one with memories of the past carved into his flesh. Stiles turned his face to the side as Derek traced a thumb over the long scar across his throat. "What happened?"

Stiles covered Derek's hand with his own and smiled slightly, dismal and self-deprecating, looking over Derek's shoulder with a tired sadness. "He said I talked too much."

Derek cupped his cheek, made their eyes meet. He pulled the omega's arms back around his neck, holding him close as they kissed and began to rock against each other. _I'll make you forget. Every horrible thing that's ever happened to you, I'll erase._ He placed a hand, big and heavy, on Stiles' leg, just below the hem of his dress. He hesitated until Stiles whined against his mouth, and then he obeyed, pushing the omega's dress up his thighs until it pooled around his waist. Stiles gave him only a moment's breath before he lifted the dress the rest of the way over his own head, tossing it to the floor. Derek swallowed past the sudden dryness in his throat, gazing down at the omega's pliant body, the way his hips met his waist met the cradle of his ribs, how his pale skin was dotted with tiny constellations and his breasts, though only slightly less than a handful, made Derek's mouth water and his cock throb and his breath catch somewhere in his chest. "I don't-" Derek furrowed his brows "-know how to be...gentle. Anymore."

Stiles spread his legs further, dragging Derek's hand down to where he was wet and emptily clutching for Derek, ready and waiting. "My warrior." He helped shove off Derek's jeans, a demanding little thing, cheeks flushed a lovely shade of pink as Derek shucked them away, cock hard and hot and large, pressing between Stiles' pale legs. "My Rain Man," Stiles sighed, lovely and supple, whimpering into Derek's mouth as the alpha took himself in hand and began to push in.

He watched Stiles' face, ready to stop at the omega's signal. "Okay?" he grunted, voice surprisingly steady despite the thundering of his heart. Stiles stubbornly nodded, though his eyes noticeably watered. Derek pressed his lips to the omega's cheek, kissed the corner of the boy's mouth, where Stiles was biting his lip, and stuttered into a slow grind, letting him get used to Derek's size. When Stiles began softly kissing back, Derek closed the last few inches until his hips were flush, cock buried to the hilt in Stiles' dripping cunt. The omega's breathing was already ragged as he ran his hands over Derek's shoulders, buried his face in the crook of the alpha's neck. Derek thrust slowly, distracting Stiles with caresses, running his hands over the boy's body, until Stiles began rocking up into him, undulating his hips— _more, more_ —and Derek was soon steadily rutting between Stiles' thighs, breathing hard, nothing but keening sobs possessing Stiles' trembling form.

Derek kissed every inch of skin he could reach, sucked bruises into the inviting tilt of Stiles' fair neck, over the mating mark, groaning low as the tightness between his legs rapidly increased. Stiles sunk his teeth into Derek's shoulder to quiet himself, and Derek swore, bowing his head and thrusting harder, making Stiles gasp out, brows furrowed, eyes shut. Derek pressed their mouths together hungrily and swallowed up the omega's desperate moans. He could see Stiles' eyes—an amber sunrise—opposite the tangerine sunset burning through the window's downy, pale curtains. He felt the slide of their chests together—Derek, solid and broad, and Stiles, soft and plush, flushed from the tips of his ears all the way down to the pink of his peaked, pebbled nipples. Derek bowed his head and wrapped his mouth around one, and Stiles bucked, arching up into him, fingers dragging through Derek's hair as the alpha sucked and laved.

Derek was growing dizzy from the tightness and the wetness and the scent that was Stiles and him, together, and he knew he was going to come. He hadn't come in a long time. He knew he should pull out and spill his seed between them, on their skin, even on the bedsheets—anywhere but inside this young, fertile omega—but when Stiles reached down and gripped his bare ass, urging him on, all coherent thoughts sailed from Derek's mind, and he thrust with abandon.

He kissed Stiles' bruised lips, sucked out the desperate gasps and hungry moans, ate up the soft simpers that escaped the omega. "Do it, please, do it," Stiles begged, high-pitched and needy, rocking his hips up to meet Derek's, demanding that the alpha finish inside him. _"Please, Derek."_ Derek swore, looping an arm under the omega's neck, pressing their cheeks together, breath hot against the bite mark on his mate's neck, as he pistoned his hips—climbing, climbing, climbing-

Stiles writhed as he came, head thrown back, choking on a sob, and Derek tumbled over after him, coming heavy and hot inside Stiles with a cutoff _fuck_  growled into the omega's ear before he finally collapsed atop the youth. Nothing but the sound of his own heavy breathing until he felt Stiles stroking his hair, pressing tender kisses to his brow, reverently touching Derek's shoulders and arms. When he pulled back, only enough to let the omega breathe easier, he let his eyes rake over the sight beneath him: Stiles—sweaty, breathless, a puddle of wetness and come leaking out of his wrecked cunt, dribbling down between his thighs. Just looking at him made Derek want to have him again, over and over, all night, into the morning.

He used his discarded shirt to mop up their mess, tenderly touching Stiles' sensitive opening, wiping away the evidence of where they had been joined together.  _So much for a clean shirt._

Stiles pulled him back down, letting Derek blanket him. He placed his head over Stiles' breast, eyes shutting, letting the omega's beating heart pacify him. Stiles combed his fingers through Derek's hair, cradling the alpha in his arms, and began humming. It sounded far away, but Derek felt the vibrations, and they calmed his racing mind and heart, tamed the howling wolf in him. The light of the setting sun still stubbornly stained the room a dim, warm, shadowy orange as they succumbed to sleep.

Outside, it began to rain.

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek sat in the driver's seat of the Jeep, parked right outside the garage, staring out at the vastness of the land. He had taken her for a test drive earlier and had come to the conclusion that she was finally ready to reclaim her place amongst the dust and sand. The stars overhead twinkled and shined, taunting Derek from lightyears away. _What's in us is out there,_ Stiles had said.  _We're all connected._

"Derek?" Stiles called from inside the house. After a moment, he came out onto the porch. He rubbed his naked arms for a moment, bracing himself against the cool night air. Derek glanced away from him to assess the Ridge once more, mind wandering to the thought of what laid beyond. Stiles stepped further out, bare feet against the edge of the porch. "Come back to me," he said, simple as that.

And so Derek did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [in the muddy water we're falling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss8t7a8n0U4) ❀

He shivered when he felt Derek's calloused palms running down his arms, warm lips pressing to his neck, whiskers tickling his skin. His hands ran up Stiles' sides to clutch his waist, just above where his linen was tied, and he slid deft fingers between the folds and tugged, pulling the end of it with him as he moved off. Stiles was helpless to him, letting himself be drawn back to his room— _their_ room, nowadays—for another round of early morning coupling. Now that they'd had each other, they were always wanting more.   
  
Halfway down he hall, Derek lifted Stiles with an arm under his ass, using the other to help the omega wrap his legs around his waist, and feeling his strength made Stiles dizzy, weak, wet. Derek laid him back against the rumpled sheets and began picking Stiles' linens apart like he was unwrapping a present, pulling the folds of Stiles' dress away from his quivering body like he was coaxing a flower to unfurl. Stiles shivered again when Derek crawled down between his legs, held his thighs apart, and began kissing a trail from his navel to his dripping, flushed sex. His breath was hot against Stiles' wetness, which seemed ever-flowing and relentless these days, like a mighty river, and when the alpha descended, it took everything in Stiles not to cry out and wake the kids.

 

❀❀❀

 

It didn't rain again.

Days continued on, the land shriveling back up, the sun a hot brand on their backs. It was as if they had dreamt it all—the soil and the seeds and the water falling from the sky.

They worked on the field, and Stiles reread every word in every possible book he had about growing, and still the hot sun beat down from its spotless, pale sky and the land grew thirsty again and the sand was just sand once more. After they had to go back to rationing the water, Derek would occasionally kneel between Stiles' thighs and lick him until he could drink from his mate— _w_ _ater, water, water-_

 _Aquifer,_ his mind had supplied, and now he knew for a fact that that was the only thing that could be their saving grace. Every day they went out to the field, searching for something—anything—some sign of hope. There was nothing. Just sand, as Derek feared. If they kept irrigating this useless dirt, eventually they'd end up drawing from the drinking water, but Stiles insisted they keep going.

"There has to be something," he said, and Derek didn't have the heart to tell him it just wasn't true. The land was dead down to the core of the Earth and Derek knew it—he'd always known it—but he couldn't tell Stiles that. He was humouring the process now, silently making calculations about water supply. He'd play along until it was life-threatening, probably, and then he'd tell the omega, even if it meant shattering his mate's heart.

 

❀❀❀

  

"Where do we go when we die?"

"We go to the Night Lands where we become stars."

Scott wrinkled his nose. "I don't want to be a star."

"Not even a shooting star? Making people's wishes come true?" Erica proposed.

"Technically, when you make a wish upon a star, you're actually a few million light years late," Lydia said offhandedly.

"Hear that?" Jackson smirked across the table at Scott, tearing off a piece of his bread and popping it into his mouth. "We die, we become dead stars, and then we collect dead dreams—just like yours from last night." Boyd shut him up with one look. 

Isaac looked up at Stiles. "Is your daddy a star?"

"Yes," Stiles said.

"And your mommy?"

"Yes."

Kira thought on this. "I don't think you'll be one."

Stiles furrowed his brows. "Why not?"

"You'll probably just end up being the moon. That's what the Rain Man thinks you are, anyway."

Derek choked on his food, dropping his spoon back into his plate. Stiles wasn't sporting a blush, but his lips quirked into a small smile. He didn't meet Derek's eyes, which Derek found odd. Stiles was all about confrontation.

"I'm tired," Isaac announced halfway through the meal.

"Yeah, well, I've been tired since before you were born," Stiles snapped suddenly, and everyone went still, shocked. The omega didn't look up from his dish. "Eat your food," he said quietly.

They passed the rest of the meal in silence.

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles was out in the field again, sitting across from the little sprig. Only it wasn't a sprig anymore so much as it was a ripened stalk of wheat, bright green and tall. It was also lonely, with no others to accompany it in the barren field.

"How long's he been out there?" Derek asked. He'd asked the same thing the day before. And the day before that. He'd been asking for a long time now. Every morning for the past month, though he couldn't be entirely sure. He'd stopped notching slits into his bedframe around day ninety-nine, mainly because he'd practically moved into Stiles' room, but also because continuing to count the days seemed wrong somehow. It was something prisoners did, or slaves. Not men who'd been handed a good, honest life with good, honest people.

Lydia didn't look at him when she answered, "I don't think he's slept."

Derek clenched his jaw. "Are you telling me he was out there all night?" The alpha cursed his failing senses for the thousandth time.

Lydia shrugged, gaze still trained out the window. "Why don't you go ask him yourself?" She turned and left. Erica, uncharacteristically quiet, got up from the sofa a few seconds later and followed after her sister. Derek rubbed a hand over his face. What would he say? What _could_ he say? The seeds hadn't taken. The rain did nothing. The soil was stagnated.  _Your hope is killing you, angel._  

"I really don't feel like talking to or seeing anyone."

Derek frowned down at the omega's linen-covered back. "Then we don't have to talk," he said. "And you don't have to look at me."

Stiles heavily sighed, a single, drawn out breath of exasperation. He stood and turned after a moment and walked straight into Derek's chest. "Take me to bed."

Derek did.

"Do you remember the people you've killed?" Stiles asked, head pillowed on Derek's chest.

 _I've never forgotten them._ "All the time," he replied.

"Do you wish you could forget them?"

"I wouldn't want to." Stiles tilted his head up, letting Derek's breath brush over his temple. "You should never stop thinking about a life you've taken. That's the price you pay for taking it."

"Do you see them?" Stiles whispered, and Derek couldn't answer because that one hit too close to home, so he kissed the omega's brow, Stiles understood, and they hushed so they could sleep.

 

❀❀❀

 

"What is it with you today?" his mother had asked his father one morning. Stiles remembered well because he was five and it was one of his only memories of the Long Winter.

"Oh, you know," his father had said. "Sun shining. Birds chirping." His mother had raised a brow, as if reminding him that they were in an underground vault.

Sitting here now, waiting for the seeds to grow, Stiles wondered how she had laughed so easily at his father's words. This disappointment after coming so far—it killed him. Hoping had brought nothing but pain in the end. It wasn't enough anymore.

He curled up around the frail, golden stalk of wheat, protecting it from the unkind heat of the sand, the punishing whip of the winds.  _I'm sorry. I'm sorry none of it was enough. I'm sorry you're the only one._ The stalk swayed, bowing over, wilting, nudging up against Stiles' cheek as his tears fell, as if to say,  _I'm sorry, too._

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek was out for another test run with the Jeep when he spotted the speck in the distance, something glinting against the sunlight, blinding him, and then a dot suddenly moving across the flats—human-shaped. A few yards more, and Derek was slamming down on the gas, the form sharpening into the figure of a man, a pair of binoculars jutting out from his face.

_Spy._

The man took a moment to spot the vehicle coming at him, but then he was sprinting off, aiming to lose Derek in the foothills. _Not fast enough._ Derek was on his tail and speeding past, cutting him off. The man—a boy, really—jerked back, tripping himself ass-first into the sand. He reeked of fear, and Derek was afraid he'd piss himself. He swung out of the Jeep, stalking toward the boy, who scrambled back on shaky, bandage-wrapped hands. He opened his mouth and Derek slammed down on him, arm over the kid's throat, knees pinning his arms into the sand by his head.

"Who sent you?" Derek snarled.

The boy looked like he was going to bite his tongue, so Derek raised a hand, claws extending. The kid quickly sputtered out, "The Colonel, _please,_ it was the Colonel," and Derek decided that he couldn't be any older than Stiles, maybe fifteen, sixteen.

"You tell your Colonel nothing, understand?" Derek growled, bearing his teeth, fangs protruding from his gums.

The boy whimpered, turning his head to the side as he squirmed. "I understand! Please, just-"

He didn't believe the boy. Of course he didn't, but he didn't have a choice—he couldn't kill a kid, even if said kid was likely posted out here for weeks, collecting intel, reporting back to the Colonel in exchange for nothing but his own life, probably. They were all victims of circumstance out here, and now the damage was done. The Colonel had known he existed, but now he'd know what Derek was to Stiles, how the omega carried Derek's mating mark on his neck.

Derek released him, already striding towards the Jeep. He was tearing back off towards the house before the boy could even stand again.

He knew the Colonel would come for them. He knew it was all too good to last, too good to be anything but temporary. He didn't sleep for three nights and involuntarily gave in on the fourth, nodding off after laying his eyes to rest only a moment, Stiles' calm, dreaming face branded behind his lids after hours of watching over him. He woke suddenly, burning hot, sweating buckets. Where was he? _Bed. House. Desert._ The years slid back into place. The fallen world righted itself.

A mercifully cool hand touched his cheek. When he looked up, he was met with Stiles' worried face. The omega's eyes were soft and weepy, like he was suddenly seeing everything Derek always kept locked away in his head. He leaned down and kissed Derek's brow. "Me, too. I have the bad dreams, too." Derek's breathing steadied. Maybe everyone had the bad dreams, everyone left in the world.

Stiles cradled the alpha's head against his soft chest, threading his fingers through Derek's hair, lips warmly brushing against Derek's better ear as he breathed, "I love you, my Rain Man." It was so soft that Derek wasn't sure he had heard it right. It stole the breath from his lungs, and in the end, he chose to ignore the omega. He was half-deaf, after all. Maybe Stiles would assume he didn't hear him. Maybe he had finally gone completely deaf. Maybe he was hallucinating it. Either way, the implication was too impossible, so he drifted off to sleep instead, far too quickly to wish the omega in his arms a happy birthday.

 

❀❀❀

  

Stiles was on edge throughout the day, as though he wanted to say something, but didn't quite know how to bring it up. "Derek," he softly began after third meal, out by the garage, watching Derek putter around the bike as the children remained inside, occupied by their books. Derek had been dreading this since he woke up. The omega fidgeted, fingers lacing, unlacing, amber eyes bright and warm when he said, impossibly tender, "I love you."

Derek stared at him for a long, hard moment. He had no idea what he could possibly say to make this better, to fix it. "No, you don't." It was clearly not the reaction Stiles was hoping for because his wavering little smile sharply turned into a frown, taken aback. Derek couldn't bear the hurt and confusion etched into the omega's pale, troubled face, and suddenly his skin felt too tight, the garage too small.

Stiles picked up a handful of sand, opened his fist, and showed Derek. "Look. I'll swear on this that I do. How's that?"

"That's a crap thing to swear on."

"This sand is older and truer than everything." The hesitance in his voice sounded foreign to Derek's ears. "Surely it's the best thing to swear on?"

Derek huffed.

"It's truer than us," Stiles said softly, letting the sand spill from his fingers.

Derek shook his head and pushed past him. "You don't love me, Stiles," he repeated.

"Why? Why don't I love you?" Stiles was flat-out offended now, tense and anxious. "Because I'm too young? Because I've been so disrespected and hurt all my life that I'd fall for any alpha that showed me a lick of kindness?"

 _Yes._ And that was the awful truth, wasn't it?

"You're a good man."  _You've known nothing but wretched ones. Of course I'd seem like a good man._ Derek wasn't a miracle. He shouldn't be praised for being decent, for not bringing Stiles deliberate pain. He was a poor excuse for an alpha— _and a mate,_ a voice that sounded like Laura's added.

"Stop punishing yourself!" Stiles cried out, tugging at Derek's shirt.

"You don't know-"

 _"I do,"_ Stiles snapped. "My whole family was torn apart because of that  _monster!"_ His eyes grew unshed with resentful tears. "My mother was ripped away from me and raped until she killed herself. My father's cold body was laid out in front of this house the day I turned twelve. I was beaten for taking in orphans, for riding, for depending on myself—every single freedom I had was taken from me. And you want to know the worst part? The Colonel isn't even the only Jackal who's ever tried to hurt me for it."Stiles spat it all out with a hatred Derek didn't know he even possessed, silencing the alpha, making him flinch back. _"I know,_ Derek." The boy raised his head, refusing to concede to his distress. "I know better than anyone."

Derek lowered his head in shame.  _Not the only Jackal._ He stared down at his hands because he didn't deserve to gaze upon the omega.  _Not the only Jackal._ How could he be so thick-skulled?  _He's young and bears fruit. Of course other_ _alphas wanted to mount him. Of course the Colonel isn't the only dirty rat in this desert. Of course leaving Stiles all alone was his doing._

"I know what I feel," Stiles whispered, and Derek shook his head. "What did you expect? What did you want me to do?" Stiles had such a sadness in his voice that it made Derek physically ill. "You mated me! You made love to me! You were everything I wanted! How dare you say I don't love you?" Derek couldn't meet his eyes, but he could tell from the quaking of the omega's shoulders that he was crying now. "You ruined it," Stiles snarled. "Something's died in me. It took a long time for it to happen, but it's dead. You took the one thing I thought was mine to give and turned it into dirt, and I hate you for it, Derek Hale, _I hate you!"_

"I never asked for this," Derek snapped back, turning away.

"What do you want me to say?" Stiles shuffled around him, futilely followed after Derek's withdrawing form, trying to get the alpha to look at him. "You want me to apologize? Say I'm sorry for saving your life?"

"I never asked for this!" Derek surged forward and gripped him by his pale shoulders. "I never asked for this, Stiles! I never asked for this!"

Stiles yanked himself out of Derek's grip, tears streaking his face, and began storming back to the house.

"Stiles, wait," Derek sighed. The omega ignored him, marching up the porch steps. "Stiles-"

Stiles whipped around and lunged at him, which Derek did not at all anticipate, and he went down hard on his side as they fell into the dirt together. Derek grunted and rolled them as Stiles thrashed and yelled. "Stop," Derek begged, trying to control Stiles' flailing limbs, fighting back against the omega's raging burst of strength. "Stiles, just stop-" he pinned the omega as best as he could, and still Stiles relentlessly writhed, crying out. "Fuck— _stop!"_

Stiles fell back into the sand, stubborn tears staining his flushed cheeks as he went limp.

"Please," Derek sighed. _You don't want a life with me, angel._ "Don't be naive," he said instead, because he was an idiot, and he hated himself the second the words left his mouth.

Stiles sucked in a breath so sharp and cutting that it was crystal clear to Derek's ears. "I may be naive," Stiles said lowly, an exasperated tremor rising in his voice, "but at least I'm not a selfish, jaded _asshole!"_

"Selfish? _Selfish?"_ Derek growled back, anger just as equally evident in his furrowed brows and gritted teeth. "You think staying here for you was selfish? You think giving up the only chance of ever seeing my sister again was selfish?" His heart was in his throat. "What about loving _you?_ You think that was selfish?"

It rushed to his chest, suddenly—a flood of water that was terrifyingly clear. Stiles had once been a trickle, and now he flowed over Derek's skin and through his veins and inside his heart. He was here with Derek, with his face so close, always chasing Derek with the light when the alpha ran to the shadows, exposing everything with his bright smiles and laughter, and Derek had opened his mouth until his lungs were full of Stiles' water. He hoped so much that his wolf was a secret fish, that he could swim with this and relearn how to breathe, because he—no matter how much he tried to stop himself—loved Stiles, probably, and it was drowning him.

The omega lay beneath him, hair surrounded by a halo of sand, chest heaving, like after one of their ruts, but this time Derek was the most naked and the most scared he'd ever been. He didn't know how to explain that the omega was asking the impossible of him, but Stiles would resent him forever if he didn't confess what was in his heart.

"My sister, I-" he forced himself to meet the omega's eyes. "I see her."

Stiles searched his face for a moment.

Derek scrambled off of him.

"Derek-" 

"I see her!" Stiles stared back at him as they stood. "I see her, Stiles. I always see her. She's everywhere. All the time." The hallucinations meant he was crazy, so Derek never admitted they were there, not out loud, at least, not to anybody—he hadn't _had_ anybody, no one except Laura's voice, really—until Stiles. He'd just quietly accepted, in his own scattered brain, that he'd finally gone mad. "She's in Beacon Hills." _Spit it out._ "I can't-" the words were stuck in his throat. Stiles reached up and cupped Derek's face, unwilling to allow him to slip away again to the secret place he hid when the hurt was too great. "I can't do it again," he choked out, and it strangled the last of his composure from his chest. "I can't lose you."  _Please love me this way. There's no other way I know how to be. I am only this._

"Oh, Derek," Stiles breathed, and Derek shut his eyes, an ache lifting from his shoulders as their foreheads brushed, and for a merciful moment, there was just quiet. Then Stiles reminded Derek for the millionth time, "I'm tough," and Derek didn't have the heart to tell him, _My sister was tough, too._

 

❀❀❀

 

Weeks dragged by after the spy incident. Derek's paranoia and fear tripled with every passing day. He could barely function. He wandered out with the daybreak, Laura whispering his eyes shut as he forced himself to keep watch, to patrol the land, armed from head to toe. He wanted to go away for a while, to see something other than sand, to rest—so he did. He didn't think he had gone far, but when he looked back, the house was just a dot on the horizon. He had staggered so far away he was at the foothills again. He stumbled a few steps, collapsed into the sand, face twisted in agony as he opened his mouth and screamed, a terrible noise that woke the coyotes, their howls echoing Derek's cry. It felt good for half a moment, and then Derek covered his ears, bent at the waist until someone brushed up against his back—no, not someone-

The wolf was black except for the deep yellows of its eyes, staring back at Derek without pause. He knew it was a wolf because of the extensive collection of wolf-related books Erica enjoyed showing him, but also because the prickle of his skin and the tingle in his spine said,  _We_ _'re the same._ So he kept kneeling there in the dirt, miserable and unable to comprehend what he was seeing. And then the wolf threw its head back and howled, deep and powerful, reverberating through Derek's bones.

He thought about being in Stiles' room their first night together—how easy it was to make him come, then lying with him afterwards, breathing into his hair, and how small the omega felt tucked against him all night, and his little waist and his bare feet brushing against Derek's calves-

He couldn't keep it. It wasn't something that he was ever meant to have. And yet, he'd never wanted anything more than to wake up to that every morning for the rest of his miserable fucking life. Derek was going to love Stiles so good and warm and right that he'd forget his conditioned response of flinching away because of a lifetime of battered nerves. Derek would erase the way the world hurt him, all the ways that it first held him by the throat and shook him. Derek couldn't fathom how the omega could still ask him to wrap Stiles into his arms when so many others had been cages.

_Still want a life with me, angel?_

A sudden flash of something in his brain, the image of what their life could be—a house by the ocean, the kids running around, a baby with Stiles' constellations and Derek's dark complexion.  _I_ _do,_ Stiles' voice echoed through his mind, snapping Derek back to the moment.

In the distance, the sun peeked out over the Ridge, and from over the horizon, a cloud of dust rose.

 

❀❀❀ 

 

The sky was orange and pink where the sun was rising. Stiles paused by the porch, on his way back from collecting the dry clothes from the line. His eyes fell in front of him. There were words there, written in the sand. He stood at the bottom and read.

_gone to town._

_x_

Stiles knelt down beside it, a faint smile tugging at his lips, despite himself. Derek was a quick learner. He traced his fingers through the 'x', rubbed it out, then drew it again. He wondered if one of the children had taught the alpha what it meant. Derek didn't seem like the kind of man to write an 'x' in the sand, a kiss, especially so soon after their fight, stubborn as he was, and Stiles felt his stomach flip a bit when he thought about it, though he wasn't sure if it was because it made him feel uneasy so much as relieved.

A part of him felt glad that Derek was finally letting up about Stiles being at the house by himself. People tried to protect Stiles because they didn't think he was capable of being sneaky or strong, but he was. He'd proved that to Deaton and Marin over the years, he'd managed it by making a deal with the Colonel. He had to be strong to survive this long. And Derek did believe he was strong, but Stiles was tired of living in constant fear.

A sudden creak out on the porch. Stiles frowned. Derek would march up those steps with purpose, even when he was feeling down or surly. Another drawn out creak. His breath caught somewhere in his throat. "Boyd," he said heavily, "lock the hatch." The hole to the bunk slammed shut with a loud, metal thud, and in the same moment, the front door burst through on its hinges.

Stiles dropped his book on the floor.

The Colonel walked through the hole of broken wood. "Hello, dove." Stiles backed up slowly as the Colonel advanced, stepping through the mess of dust and wood chips scattered across the floor, eyes like dirty hands, touching Stiles all wrong, raking over him. He groped for the gun on the counter behind him, but the Jackals were already there, yanking it out of his hands, gripping him by the arms, forcing him still as the Colonel walked up and yanked the linen away from his neck, baring his shoulders and pale neck and the mark of his mating to Derek, finally exposed.

A heartbeat of dead silence, and then the Colonel began to laugh. He gathered himself enough to mock Stiles: "You think you could escape _me?_ The Jackal, the Colonel of the Ridge, _the King of the Desert?"_ His Jackals smirked all around him, and Stiles thought the jackrabbit pace of his heart would surely kill him if the Colonel didn't. "Where's your precious alpha to save you now?"

Stiles jerked forward, snarling, and the Colonel backhanded him without hesitation. He gripped Stiles by the chin, yanking him forward. "Where's your rain?" he sneered, hungrily staring down at Stiles' mouth. "Not that it matters anymore. All bets are off when you're a rule breaker." He nodded towards the door.

The Jackals hauled Stiles forward, dragging him out as he kicked and screamed, biting at their dirty fingers. The Colonel sighed once they were out on the porch. "Forgot what a little brat you could be," he groused, as if commenting on the weather. "Quite unattractive." He took the steps two at a time, striding forward to the tanks and rigs waiting in the short distance. The Jackals were still struggling with Stiles as the vehicles pulled up, and the Colonel turned back to him once more. "This ends one way: with me getting what I want." They shoved Stiles into one of the trucks. He immediately began throwing himself against the sides of the vehicle, smashing his hands against the windows, screaming bloody murder.

"Great One, what of the alpha?"

"And the children, Great One?"

Stiles stopped, pressing up against the the glass to better hear over the roars of the thundering engines. The Colonel stroked his chin, turning to face Stiles. He smiled.

"Kill them all."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodness, things got dark supa fast. Also, I know I sneaked an extremely overused joke into this chapter, but the setup was perfect, dude, I couldn't _not_. There will be no apologies today, my friends.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [Who knew loving you would be a crime?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar7-tN-Jw7Y) ❀

There was a hand on his cheek, brushing his tears away.

"Don't be upset, my love," a voice murmured, and Stiles blinked against the haziness to see his mother better. He was little, and she was beautiful, and they sat cross-legged across from each other in the Sunken City as the Long Winter consumed the earth above the surface, or—according to some of the road warriors—died off, coming to an end. "Daddy will return soon. Aren't you happy we can go home?"

Stiles' lip wobbled. _"Scared,"_ he whispered shakily.

His mother smiled, and she cuddled him close. "When we go home, you'll see that there's nothing to be scared of. You'll love it."

Stiles had been born in darkness, in a vault beneath the fallen world. He did not see the sun, the moon, the mountains, not even a grain of sand, until he was already a grown boy. He had never seen anything that was beautiful. Until, one day, everyone was allowed onto the surface. They had stepped out together, as a family, his mother and father joined at the hands, him riding on his father's shoulders, and the first thing he saw was the sky, the biggest, bluest thing he had ever laid his eyes on. 

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" his mother had asked him, just as the sun peeked out over the horizon. It hit Stiles' face, warm and bright and so, so right. He could do nothing other than nod, eyes wide, taking the world in.

 

❀❀❀

 

When Stiles woke, he thought maybe it had all just been a bad dream because he was in his bed, spooned against the solid line of heat that was Derek. His vision swam for a second as he blinked his eyes open, but when it sharpened, he realized—no, not _his_ bed—he was in a different bed, one with a large mattress and plush pillows and silky blankets thrown all over it. The last thing he remembered was opening up a book. Then the Colonel dragging him out of his home, shoving him into a truck, followed by a sharp pain at the back of his skull, and then darkness. The details came flooding back to him. He'd been taken— _abducted_ —by the Colonel. The warmth at his back shifted and Stiles jerked away, scrambled backward, falling over the side of the bed in his haste. He was still wearing his linens, and he wasn't in pain—he hadn't been violated yet. The Colonel sighed, unimpressed, looking up at him from the bed. 

"What have you done?" Stiles demanded, wishing his voice wasn't so weak and frightened.

Of course, he already knew the answer. The Colonel sighed again and sat up. "I've taken what's mine, little dove."

"I am not _yours-"_

He barely got the words out before the Colonel sprung to his feet and rushed forward.  _"_ _Quiet,"_ he thundered. By the time Stiles registered the sting of the slap, he was already crumbled on the floor, hand cupping his cheek—habit, more than anything else. He gingerly touched his lip. His fingertips came back red. He tasted the blood as the pain manifested. "My spy saw you with the alpha drifter," the Colonel said. Stiles didn't dare to look up. The man shared height with Derek, even if he wasn't as huge—as tall as a doorway, yet not nearly as wide as its entrance—but Stiles knew the Colonel could snap his neck in a second, no questions asked. "I didn't believe it at first," the Colonel muttered darkly. "My little dove, mated and bearing the mark of another upon his neck?" He grabbed Stiles' by his hair, yanking his head up, and Stiles saw the disgust and fury in the alpha' eyes as he laid them upon the mating mark. "And that of a fucking road warrior? You let a feral wolf between your legs, you little whore!" The Colonel threw Stiles back onto the bed. "You are _mine!"_ Stiles shrunk away in the corner of the bedding, tugging his torn linens down over his legs. The Colonel sighed again. "Why must you resist me? If you were my mate, I would spoil you with furs and jewels. I wouldn't let you live out there in the sand, in a _shack."_

"It's my _home!"_

"It's _nothing!"_

Stiles whipped his head up. "I will _never_ be yours," he spat, and braced himself for another blow.

It never came.

"You violated the rules of our deal," the Colonel said simply, and the calm in his voice sent chills down Stiles' spine. Perhaps this was really it, and the Colonel knew it. Stiles had nowhere to run to, no deals to keep him safe.

"You have to let me go," he pleaded brokenly. "My kids, they need me-"

"Not for long," the Colonel quipped.

Stiles furrowed his brows, then remembered the Colonel's last words before he was knocked out. He gritted his teeth, fists clenching. "Derek will protect them. Derek will come for me."

The Colonel shrugged, chuckling to himself like it was comical. "Then we'll wait for him, hm? And when he comes, I will make him watch as I split you on my cock." He smiled viciously. "And then I will kill him."

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek didn't remember the short journey back to the house except that when he came upon it and saw the door broken in, all his fears washed over him like a wave, choking him, making him sink to his knees. He was surrounded in seconds, guns pointed at his head, the Jackals yipping and laughing manically as they unarmed him, impressed with themselves for catching the desert wolf.

"He's a big one, ain't he?"

"Not so tough, though."

"Where're your claws, puppy?"

"The Colonel's dove was a sneaky one, that one."

"Maybe he'll let us have a taste-"

Derek had the beta's gun held to his own head in an instant, pulling the trigger, blood splattering the side of his face as the man went limp, brains blown out. He took advantage of the Jackals' moment of shock to take down two others before they reacted properly. Derek used the dead body as a shield—the risk of finding out if these bullets were laced with wolfsbane was too high—and took down three more before he stumbled behind one of the rigs to take cover. He yanked the guy behind the wheel out and added him to the body count, throwing him atop the other beta's limp form. He made the mistake of glancing to the lifeless bodies and froze. They were young, boys no older than Stiles, and Derek momentarily fought against his guilt, swore beneath his breath, and forced himself to pelt the last of the Jackals left out in the open before his clip ran out.

One of the Jackals turned and _sprinted_ back to the house, but Derek was already striding out from behind the truck and aiming. The Jackal jerked as the bullet connected, and he fell face forward into the sand. Derek picked his confiscated gun off one of the dead bodies and ran for the porch. A Jackal met him out at the entrance, and Derek knocked him back before putting a bullet in him, too. Another Jackal fired off from inside the house, nicking his arm, and Derek jumped back from the splintered doorway. Blood trickled down his elbow. _Shit._ He sucked in a sharp breath, hurled himself sideways, and fired inside. The Jackal yelped, and Derek waited for the sound of his body hitting the floor before he picked himself up and entered.

The place was ransacked, books fallen everywhere, chairs overturned, the blood of the Jackal Derek just killed splattered across the wall. He ignored the beta's wheezing breaths and kicked his gun away.

Derek immediately checked on the kids, shouting out each of their names. The hatch was still shut tight despite the visible signs of struggle for entry—dozens of bullet dents in the thick metal—and Derek turned his head, meeting the eyes of the man who tried to break in, and shot him again, right between his eyes.

The hatch creaked open a minute later, and Boyd peeked out, shotgun aimed at Derek's head. He visibly relaxed when he saw who it was, and looked like he was about to help the children down, when Derek held up a hand, saying, "Not yet." He glanced at the array of dead bodies everywhere. "They don't need to see this." Boyd nodded once, understanding, and began climbing down himself. "No, you, too. Stay," Derek said, stepping forward, and Boyd rolled his eyes, Lydia following down after him.

Erica's head hovered over the edge, her face lined with worry. "What's happening?"

Derek swallowed. He needed to be strong, keep it together for the kids. "I'm going to get Stiles back."

 _"We_ are," Lydia corrected.

Derek shook his head, ears ringing. "You two can't come," he said, hoping his voice was commanding enough to deter them.

Lydia huffed. "You're not the boss of us." She crossed her arms. "We're helping you." Boyd nodded beside her.

Derek ran a tired hand over his face. "You're-"

"We're not kids anymore, Rain Man," Lydia said. "We haven't been in a long time." Her eyes were sharp and fierce, and Derek knew there was not a thing he could say to change her mind.

"Stiles would have my head."

"We'll deal with that later," she said, already stepping over the Jackal's body and striding out the door. Boyd followed his sister outside.

Derek glanced up at Erica. "Stay up there. Be safe. Take care of your siblings. Everything's gonna be okay."

She didn't look too sure, but she was just as stubborn and brave as Stiles, so she just nodded, biting her lip, and shut the hatch once more.

Lydia was seating herself in the Jeep and Boyd was starting up the bike when Derek approached them. "So what's the plan?" Boyd asked.

Derek sighed, mind wandering to Stiles for a moment.  _I swear on my life, if that monster has laid a single hand on-_

"I've got one," Lydia said, cradling a matchbox in her hand.

Derek and Boyd shared a look.

"Let's hear it."

 

❀❀❀

 

They approached the Ridge on foot so as not to alert anyone. The three of them crouched behind a large, jagged boulder before the Pass, peeking out to wage the quiet and still of Town in the not-yet morning. All was peaceful, but that would change soon.

"Hope you're good sneaks," Derek mumbled, the load of fuel on his back weighing him down.

"We're not the ones who stumble our way into disastrous situations all the time," Lydia lightly shot back, but Derek went rigid. His poor hearing was a bit of a sore spot, and right now it truly meant life or deaf.

He grunted and handed two of the vessels of gasoline off to her and Boyd. He looked upon both of them for a moment, jolted by the sudden pang of affection that ran through him. Without giving it another thought, he pulled them close one by one, cupping their faces in his large hands, and hugged them. Then he pointed to the east and west. "You know what to do," he said. Derek crouched there in the sand and closed his eyes for a moment, Stiles' face flashing beneath his lids, laughing and bright. He took off first, straight for the Ridge.

His footfalls sounded deafening to his own ears, along with the pounding of his heart, but Derek was already half-deaf, so he imagined that they were actually much louder than what he was hearing. He darted between the huts and tents, invisible under cover of the half-darkness. Once he came to the end of the row of shops, he sucked in a sharp breath and launched up against the side of the Ridge, immediately taking cover behind a barrier of rubble. The lower extensions of the Ridge were still bathed in the night, but the slowly rising sun cast the upper tiers in dim morning light, and Derek searched for movement-

Nothing. Just darkness.

He began climbing and dousing the Ridge in fuel.

The first Jackal he came across was squatted behind a rock as he carefully aimed his rifle down at the base of the canyon, where Derek saw Lydia pouring out the gasoline along the foot of the Ridge. Derek didn't want to shoot—it would alert the rest of the Colonel's goons right away—so instead he snapped the Jackal's neck, and the beta emitted a short, low whine before falling slack. Derek removed his keffiyeh and tied it up around his own face. Disguised as a Jackal, he moved a bit more freely, darting between boulders, pouring out gasoline. No one had shouted a warning of their intrusion yet. Suddenly, something shifted in his peripheral, and Derek's eyes darted up, instinctively aiming his gun, before he recognized Boyd's dark face hovering above a big, red rock, nodding towards the largest ledge of the Ridge, a little ways down from where he was, tankard of gasoline raised above his head in triumph— _empty._

Derek advanced in a crouch, forcing deep, calm breaths through his nose, and then he saw it: the shape of a large vault nestled between the bedrock. 

_The Colonel._

Then, louder, the wind in his ears:  _Stiles._

 

❀❀❀

 

The Colonel snatched his ankle and dragged him along the bedding, pulling Stiles towards his towering form. Stiles cried out, desperately kicking and clawing, heel catching the Colonel square in the gut. The hand of the alpha whipped down and backhanded him, jerking his face to the side. _"Enough,"_ the Colonel growled, and if there was any confusion, he gripped Stiles by the hair and tilted his head back, pressing the flat side of a long blade to his throat. "Come, my little dove," he purred, gliding the knife down across Stiles' skin, letting it slice through the first layer of his linens. He pressed his lips to the omega's ear. "It's time to clip your wings."

The knife was haphazardly tossed amongst the bedding as the Colonel bore down on him, shoving his face against Stiles' neck, tugging at his linens. Stiles groped blindingly for the knife and whipped it forward, nearly meeting flesh-

The Colonel immediately snatched his wrist. They tumbled off the bedding in their struggle, and the Colonel wrestled him onto his back, even as Stiles put all his weight behind trying to bury the blade into the alpha. The Colonel slammed Stiles' hand back against the ground, knife thumping against the fur rug.

 _"No,"_  Stiles cried out, desperately thrashing.

The Colonel's face had changed, replaced by a mask of utter rage, and beneath that, something worse—a maniacal light in his eyes—the Colonel's real face, and he suddenly had Stiles by the throat, shaking him like a rag doll, Stiles' mouth opening in a soundless cry—choking, choking, choking. He clawed at the Colonel's hands, but they were like slabs of stone crushing his windpipe. The world was spinning, the light fading, reducing to a pinpoint.

He felt his mother take his hand, guiding him. Where were they? An endless sea full of golden wheat set inside one of his books. _No one will hurt you anymore,_ she said, but Stiles didn't want to go with her. _Where's Derek?_ _Where are the kids?_ His mother looked very sad for him. _I don't want to give up,_ he told her, and she cupped his cheek. _Like I did?_ she asked sadly. Stiles reached for her.  _I don't think that._ She smiled at him and kissed his brow, backing away to where his father waited further off in the swaying field. _Hope is not a mistake, my love._  

 

❀❀❀

 

They set fire to the Ridge.

The flames licked up the sides of the canyon, forming a ring of wild flames, and the Jackals were thrown into a flurry of chaos. They threw themselves off the rocks in panic, stumbled their way down to the base of the gorge, tearing at their scorched clothes and singed hair, disordered and torn over how to best extinguish the blaze. They were hesitant over using the water supply, which Derek had been counting on. He waited in a crouch as the Colonel's guards abandoned their post and joined the mayhem.

The Colonel shoved open the vault, coming out to see what all the commotion was about. Derek dropped down onto the ledge.

The Colonel's surprised face greeted him, frozen in a sort of dazed mask, and Derek glanced to the side, inside the vault, to see Stiles laying on the floor, unmoving. He met the Colonel's eyes over the heat-haze, mind running back through all the promises he'd made to erase every trace of this monster's existence.

He ran to Stiles, and the Colonel escaped.

Seized by a panic deeper than any he'd ever felt, Derek fell to his knees, cradled the boy to him and shook, begging him to wake, but Stiles' limp body flailed uselessly in his arms. "No," he gasped out. "No! _No!_ I just got you back!"  _He was never yours to keep._ All those days, all the nights, all the little moments they had, the ghosts and heartbreak and hope, the beginning of their life together—only for it to come to this.

Stiles remained lifeless, finger-shaped imprints starkly standing out against his pale neck, his beautiful face marred with light bruising, lip split and swollen, the fan of his dark lashes like ink against snow.

The first time Derek saw Stiles, he thought he was dead—because angels surely didn't exist on this earth—and when he had woken, and Stiles was there, taking care of him, watching over him, Derek had looked at him and known, for the first time, that not everything in the world was ugly. He had realized that, he had known that, just as he knew the world did not allow such things—beauty and kindness and love—and still, he had let himself hope. Nothing good could ever live in this world and survive—that was reality. That was the truth of his whole life. And now Stiles was ripped away from him, just like Laura had been, just like his family, and this wasn't happening, it couldn't end this way-

He threw his head back and howled, a mournful song of a wolf, the loss of his mate burning hotter and brighter than the flames lighting up the world outside.

He didn't realize he was crying until his tears dripped down onto Stiles' pale cheek. He cried silently, shoulders shaking, dirty palm streaking his mate's cheek as he cradled it, letting the fire sweep its way into the vault.

He thought about Icarus, suddenly, the story of the boy who flew too close to the sun, only to fall to his death. Derek had wondered why he did such a thing. He was told that the sun was something dangerous, something _not_ to get close to, so why had he ignored all the warnings, all the signs? Why did he do it anyway, when he knew it'd be the end of him?

But Derek supposed he finally got it now. Because Stiles was his sun. And despite everything, he had been unimaginably worth it.

It was a long and horrible few seconds before Stiles' eyes finally flew open and he sucked in a breath with all the mighty force of a raging red storm. He winced and hacked out a throaty cough, and Derek felt relief rush through him like a cold bucket of water to the face. He pressed his face into the omega's neck, drinking in his scent, the warmth and realness of his pulse beating against his mating mark, and Derek couldn't get enough.

Stiles lifted a weak hand to cradle the back of Derek's neck, nose pressing into Derek's temple, gasping in the smell of his alpha. Derek scooped him up, cradling him close, and turned to leave the vault behind.

Out at the edge of the ledge, he looked down over the fire and the people, who had all emerged from their huts, forming a united mob against the remaining Jackals. They descended upon each other, but the Jackals were outnumbered. They were disarmed and dealt with in a handful of seconds, the Colonel standing in the middle of the masses, looking naked without his rabid dogs to defend him. The people swarmed him, and the Colonel disappeared beneath the throng of tearing hands.

Stiles tugged on Derek's collar, urging them to retreat down. Derek obeyed, jumping from rock to rock, the wolf in him newly broken through, revived—his strength and speed were already returned to him, even more so than usual, and Stiles' heartbeat, thumping steadily against his own, was the only thing grounding Derek as he coldly gazed down upon the Colonel once they stood in front of his beaten, kneeling form. He still carried Stiles in his arms, the omega's head resting against his shoulder, arms thrown around Derek's neck. Stiles hadn't yet looked at the man who'd tortured him all his life, now that he was bent and yielding, finally defeated.

"Stiles," Derek murmured, his breath puffing against the omega's cheek.

Stiles said nothing at first, the mob growing antsy. Then, with a certain affliction in his voice, said, "Let us be done with him."

"So you seek revenge," the Colonel managed to crow through his bleeding, teeth missing, face torn up and swelling all over. He looked like was about to say something else, but one of the older Town men stepped forward and struck him hard in the chest, knocking the air out of the Colonel. The men keeping him still yanked his head back, baring his throat, forcing the Colonel to watch as his fate was decided.

Stiles tugged on Derek's collar again, and the alpha carefully let him down. The omega carried himself slowly toward the Colonel. He stopped but a few steps away. "I seek justice," he said steadily, sincerely, looking down into the face of the man who had taken everything from him.

The Colonel seemed to stop breathing when Stiles suddenly spat in his face.

The omega leaned forward, the tip of his thumb tracing the scar that bridged his throat, mimicking the gesture of a promised death. He told the Colonel, "But I'll take revenge."

The people roared.

 

❀❀❀

 

"He seems older than he is, huh?" the Colonel asked casually, as if he wasn't digging his own grave. Quite literally. He was given a shovel and put to scoop out a pit in which his dead body would rest by nightfall. Less than a handful of hours past sunrise, and he was purposely working slow, despite his obvious array of attained injuries. "Wouldn't you say?" the Colonel repeated.

"He's just a boy," Derek spat, because ignoring scum was clearly a difficult task for him.

The other alpha's brows rose in an unimpressed arch. "Stiles is no child. He has _heats,_  wolf. He could have born _three_ of my children by now-"

Derek silenced him with bullet to the foot. "I think it looks deep enough," he remarked, and unsheathed his claws, ignoring the cries of the pathetic, doubled-over alpha. "Lay in your grave."

For a split second, the Colonel looked like he was going to risk the slice of Derek's claws. Derek cocked his gun in answer, and the Colonel haltingly lowered himself into the pit, foot bleeding all over the dirt.

Thunder in the distance, but no sign of clouds, except for those beginning to roll in from the north. _Figures._ Derek glanced up at where Marin and Deaton were keeping Lydia and Boyd company by their hut, then over at Stiles, who was looking out from the Pass at the dead world that lay beyond. Derek called him over.

"Burn him," is all Stiles said, and Derek raised his gun to carry it out, but Stiles stopped him. His eyes were distant when he explained himself: "Alive."

Derek stared at him. He slowly nodded. His mate needed this.

"You can't be serious," the Colonel objected. Derek handed Stiles a tankard of gasoline, and Stiles unwaveringly doused the Colonel's body with fuel. _"Stiles,"_ the Colonel spluttered, trying to evade the shower, gawking up at them as it all finally began to set in. With huge eyes, he watched as Stiles pulled out a matchbox and lit one up. Now it was the Colonel's turn to gulp for air, to watch his life be torn away by someone else, unwilling to believe these were his final moments. He curled into the corner of the pit, clawing at the walls of his grave, naively believing he could escape. Derek and Stiles watched the performance in silence until the Colonel grew pale and his thrashing became deranged.

Before Stiles could toss the matchstick down, Derek placed a hand on his arm. Stiles looked up at him. "Let me," Derek said. _This isn't a weight you should ever have to bear._  He turned to the omega, hand gently circling his hip. "Let me do this for you." _I won't let anyone's blood stain your hands—not even his._ The match kept burning, and then Stiles slowly nodded, blowing it out.

The Colonel had given up, chest heaving in resignation, sobs and wails quieted into panicky breaths. Stiles stared down into the pit. His face would be the last thing the Colonel saw. "I was never yours," Stiles told him. "I could never be yours." He watched the Colonel for a moment. "The desert will go back to belonging to the people. You're no Colonel, no king, no god. You're just a man, Rafael." Stiles cocked his head slightly, gaze lingering on the alpha's grasping hands—the hands that had brought him so much pain—which now betrayed the Colonel in his moment of desperation and despair. "And soon you won't even be that." The resignation vanished, replaced by fear once more, filling the Colonel's eyes. "Your Jackals are either dead or happy to see you die. Your grave will be left unmarked. It'll be like you never even existed." The Colonel began struggling again, snarling, reaching up for Stiles as if he thought he could haul the omega close by sheer force of will.

"I love Derek," Stiles said, and Derek looked at his mate. "He's a good man." Stiles met his gaze, nodding once.

The Colonel vehemently cursed as Derek lit a match, yelping as it was tossed down into the pit. Flame smoked against skin, melting flesh, and the Colonel screamed.

It was music to Derek's ears.

The fire quickly attracted the attention of the people, who crept back out from their huts to admire the tall column of flame and smoke.

Derek and Stiles joined Boyd and Lydia up by the hut, Deaton and Marin sitting and watching the Colonel turn to dust with tired, relieved eyes. They hugged the children close, and a few more tears were shed. They watched from there as the clouds turned all different shades of white and purple, half-shadows painting the land, sparks of electricity striking down in the distance, all over the earth below. The sky poured down, drenching everything. The Colonel's grave sizzled out, steam rising from the Ridge as every last trace of the fire was completely smothered. A few of the Town youth climbed up several levels of the Ridge and began rolling rocks, filling the pit. The haggard people turned, returning to their dwellings.

The Colonel was no more.

 

❀❀❀

 

"He lied," Stiles said.

Derek's hand paused where he was dragging a washcloth over Stiles' knee. "Who?"

"The Colonel." Stiles' brows furrowed in distress. "About the west." Derek grunted, continuing to wipe the grime from his skin. "Derek," Stiles pressed, seizing Derek's hands. "Beacon Hills could still be out there. Your sister-" his words broke off, pulling away suddenly, shoulders shaking.

"I know."

Stiles looked at Derek, not understanding, eyes brimming with tears. "Then why didn't you go? Why did you stay, Derek? There was-" his lip trembled, voice breaking. "There's nothing here for you."

Derek tossed the rag aside and gingerly cupped Stiles' raw, bruised face, their foreheads brushing, and he told his mate, because it was the only right answer in the world, _"You're here."_

 

❀❀❀

 

"You were right," Stiles whispered that night as they lay in bed, exhausted, tucked up against Derek's warmth as the rain poured outside. "What has God touched that he doesn't spoil?"

Derek turned his head, pressed his lips to Stiles' temple.

"You."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cha cha real smooth


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [this was always your dream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiGSq-N2oH0) ❀

Derek figured that the stress and trauma of what went down with the Colonel would most probably show itself in certain forms, and they did, for the most part—the first sign being Stiles' early heat, and the second being the omega's new fear of being taken from behind, of not being able to see Derek's face.

They were only five minutes in, Derek gripping his wrists and biting the back of his neck, realizing too late that Stiles wasn't moaning, but rather whimpering—crying. "What-" Derek never finished the thought because suddenly Stiles whipped around and slapped him.

Derek was so surprised that he continued to stare down at the omega for a moment, disbelieving, as Stiles began to thrash, swinging his arms, and Derek didn't know what to do, so he just wrapped his arms around the boy, pinning them together with all his strength while Stiles sobbed against his neck, helplessly writhing against Derek's hold. "It's me," Derek whispered urgently, "It's just me."

When Stiles calmed down, his eyes were far away. He slowly covered his face, attempting to hide this part of himself from Derek. "No," he murmured into his hands, voice trembling as the alpha held him close, "No, no, no-"

The panic rushed out of Derek, replaced by a nauseating anger he thought he'd never have to feel again. He pried away Stiles' hands and cupped his mate's flushed face. "What devil got you?"

Stiles just shook his head, shoulders shaking, and Derek knew. He gritted his teeth, made sure to kiss Stiles' brow and cradle him close. How could he still feel so much hatred towards a fallen warlord? The Colonel rested in a pit below the world, nothing but a handful of dust, and still Derek hated him. Derek thought he might hate him forever.

"The only one that existed," Stiles whispered after the rain picked up outside, finally answering him. "And now he's dead."

 

❀❀❀

 

The kids were taking turns riding on the back of the motorbike with Derek, yelling and laughing a little ways off from the house. Stiles no longer feared them being taken while out in the open. They could finally be children, running freely without worry of a preying tyrant who'd come and snatch them away. The world was a dangerous place in itself, but the Colonel was dead, and that gave Stiles endless comfort where it mattered.

He pinned up the last row of linens to the line, glancing over occasionally to the bright, smiling faces of the kids, to the encouraging grin of his mate. Stiles felt his heart flutter when their eyes met.  _This man._

Derek made him a fighter. Derek made him a slayer of tyrants, a wielder of the truth, a beast of family and friendship—a mate.

He settled his hand over his stomach, absently.

Stiles would make Derek a father.

 

❀❀❀

 

The stars were crisp and bright against the inky night sky.

_Where are you?_

Derek closed his eyes.

_Where did you go, brother?_

_"Shut up,"_ he hissed.

_Derek-_

_"Shut up!"_

Stiles stared at him from a few feet away. Derek sat up in the Jeep, breathing heavy. The omega looked sad for him. "She's here?"

Derek lowered his eyes, humiliated. He nodded.

Stiles climbed up and sat in the passenger side, reclining and looking up. His hand tangled with Derek's after a moment. Almost instantly, Derek's heart calmed, and the chill in the air crept into his bones, Stiles' warm hand grounding him. When he looked over, Stiles was grinning, impressed with himself.

_But you can't save me like that, angel._

Now that he'd allowed it into his head, Derek couldn't push the thought away, even though it was the honest truth. What Stiles did for Derek all those months ago wasn't this fateful thing like he thought it was. He took Derek away from everything—his ghosts, his family, his vow to find Laura. He put Derek in the sands and the heat, the dirt and the isolation. And he expected Derek to love him. And that was the hardest part. Because Derek did.

But he loved his sister, too. He couldn't forget that.

Stiles saved Derek's life, and somewhere along the way, he showed Derek one so different and beautiful that he didn't think he could ever get it out of his mind. And he couldn't get Stiles out of there, either. Stiles was stuck in Derek's brain like his own blood vessels.

Which was why he knew telling Stiles what was in his heart this time around would probably kill them both.

 

❀❀❀

 

"I have to talk to you." 

Stiles looked up, surprised. Derek was obviously anxious, and Stiles thought that maybe his secret was out, that maybe Derek's wolf senses had picked up on it somehow. "Me, too," he said carefully, and Derek pulled out a chair and sat. "You first."

Derek looked like he was going to pass out, his head bowed, knee twitching. It was unlike him. Stiles put a hand on his arm. "Derek, what is it?"

The alpha looked up and said, with all the finesse of a young boy, "I have to go."

Stiles felt his heart drop. He didn't understand. "Go where?"

Derek let out a breath, and the look he gave Stiles was one that said,  _You know where._ Stiles didn't say anything, and Derek told him, "I have to find Laura."

Stiles pulled his hand away. He couldn't listen to this.

"Stiles-"

"Why are you doing this?" His chest felt heavy, breaths coming shallowly. Maybe he was having a panic attack.

Derek reached for him, and Stiles abruptly stood, chair skidding back. "I have to," Derek said. "I have to know, Stiles. If she's out there, if there's even a chance—please, you have to _understand-"_

Stiles was turning and running. He couldn't bear to hear another word. He slammed the door shut behind him, falling back and sliding down in a heap on the floor.

Derek couldn't do this, not now, not after everything. He loved Derek. The children loved Derek. Even Jackson, who found it hard to love anyone. Even Boyd, who hadn't even known how to love someone.

Stiles didn't know how long he stayed like that, lost in his head, his world coming undone, but the sun had begun to peek out, early morning light pouring into the room, and before it had even fully risen over the horizon, he felt his frame begin to rack with sobs, hot, stinging tears sliding down his face, and he curled up right there on the floor, fingers gripping the linen over his stomach, the flutter inside, like him, dying down into a sickening puddle of despair.

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek ran a tired hand over his face. "Talk to me, Stiles." He sighed when Stiles continued his silence. "We can't leave things like this."

"You've made your decision, then."

Derek stared down at the floor. "We need to fix this before I go."

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut against the onslaught of tears. "Then I'll keep it broken so you stay."

When Derek looked up, there was fondness in his gaze, but also a quiet sadness. Stiles knew there was nothing he could say to change the alpha's mind.

"How long?" Stiles whispered.

"I don't know."

_"How long?"_

"I _don't know,_ Stiles."

A few heartbeats of silence.

"Maybe ten days, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand— _I don't fucking know."_

"A year."

Derek paused. "A year?"

"A year."

"Stiles-"

"You come back to me, and if not-"

"You want me to be here in a year?"

Stiles looked at his mate, really looked at him. "I want you to stay forever, Derek. But I want you to be happy."

Derek's face crumbled, and he buried it into his hands. 

"So a year from now," Stiles said, voice shaking. "You come back to me, and I'll know. Or you don't." He swallowed. "And I'll know." He reached out and pulled Derek in to him. "Deal?"

Derek held him fast, like he was afraid Stiles would slip away right then and there.

He whispered, "Deal."

 

❀❀❀

 

The kids had a harder time accepting it.

Boyd just straight up stopped talking to Derek. The little ones were tearful and confused, the girls heartbroken, and Jackson—well. Jackson was more bitter than usual.

"Why's he gotta go?" Scott asked, and Derek held his breath as Erica set down her book. "The Waiting Ones bother him a lot," she told the boy.  _The ghosts._ "They won't leave him alone. One of them is his sister. She could be alive. She could be looking for him." Kira crawled around the corner to the hall, where Derek stood silently, listening. She looked up at him, eyes shining, and placed a little paper boat on his foot. She turned and crawled back the way she came. "She could be waiting," Erica continued. Derek bent to pick up the boat, turning it over in his hands. "That's why they're called the Waiting Ones. They could be alive or they could be dead. Either way, they're always waiting."

The sound of the book abruptly shutting.

"The Rain Man doesn't want her to wait anymore."

 

❀❀❀

 

The thought of leaving Stiles alone with the kids made him feel sick. There were no more Jackals, no Colonel, but there could be others. There were always others, in this world. Deaton and Marin had secured peace so far, but how long would it last? Tyrants weren't born tyrants. The Colonel himself had just been a man. Who'd be next? Power-hungry, dangerous, and destructive? Who would be the next Colonel? Derek would ride out, and Stiles would wait, and anything could happen to either of them while they were apart.

But he couldn't abandon his sister. Funny thing, the heart. One second, he couldn't wait to run away from commitment, and the next, he was mated to an omega out in the middle of the desert. He couldn't stomach the idea of letting Stiles feel anything but loved for the rest of his life, and now here he was, abandoning his mate and the kids for a promise that may very well be his end.  

Derek couldn't think about that now. He made a few last adjustments to the motorbike before he was ready to set out.

Erica sniffled. "I'm gonna make you real proud-like," she whispered, and Derek bent to press a kiss to her forehead. The rest of the kids were as equally miserable, quietly watching Derek as he said goodbye to each of them.

"Don't die," Boyd said, stepped forward, and hugged him. Derek was too overwhelmed by the display to do anything other than hug him back. The boy was taller than the day they had met. He'd grown in the time Derek had been here, and he'd probably be taller than Derek the next time they saw each other. The alpha gave them all a last once-over before turning to his mate.

He walked over to Stiles. The omega was standing next to the bike, facing the Ridge, linens gently lifting in the breeze. He was holding something, his father's satchel. He thrust it out towards Derek when he approached. "A parting gift," he explained. When Derek opened it and saw what was still inside, he promptly began to refuse. Stiles ignored him, slung it over Derek's bike with the rest of his shit—water, food, bedding—everything he'd need for the journey. "It's useless here," the omega said. "If there's anything out there-" he stared off into the distance again "-at least I'll know you have a piece of me." Derek gazed down at him. "Also," Stiles added, pulling the camera from his linens. "This." Derek took it without putting up a fight this time. "To show us what's out there when you return." The omega's voice had a slight tremor in it now. Derek could see how hard he was trying to hold it together. He didn't wait to pull Stiles into his arms. He held his mate there, breathing him in. Stiles sighed into the crook of his neck, shuddering into the embrace. He pulled back after a moment, fingers fidgeting against Derek's shoulders. Derek pressed their foreheads together.

"What if you forget you love me?" Stiles whispered.

"I won't."

"But what if you do?"

He quieted Stiles with a kiss. _"I won't."_  Derek held his lovely face, brushed the tears away with his thumbs."I will never not miss you. I will never not love you." _I'll remember this, all of this, everything you are._

"Go," Stiles said. "Go so that you can come back."

They kissed, Stiles gripping Derek's jacket like a lifeline, Derek's big hands framing his face, and then Derek made himself go.

He revved the engine, and the kids began shouting out to him, running down from the porch. Stiles backed up, arms still outstretched, hands reaching towards him. Derek forced his eyes ahead. He knew if he looked at Stiles standing there and saw the children chasing after the bike, watching him leave, that he'd call the whole thing off.

He sped forward without looking back. 

As he raced under the Pass, out into the vast, dead nothing, he tried to imagine Stiles' face. _I'm sorry, angel. Try not to hate me too much._ His brain drew up the image of their wedding—their first kiss as mates, the kids laughing and cheering, the rain pouring down.

A wolf howled in the distance.

_I love you._

 

❀❀❀

 

He pitched a sand-colored tent that blended seamlessly into the surrounding wasteland so that even if anyone drove by, they probably wouldn't see him. Halfway through the night, he pulled back the flap, letting the frigid air in. He gazed up at the stars as he fell asleep.

In the morning, as he slid on his jacket, something fluttered out from one of its pockets into the dirt. Derek picked it up, shaking the sand away. At first he thought it was the photo he kept of his sister and himself.

It wasn't.

The kids were making goofy faces, all of them posed around Stiles, who wore one of his secret smiles, eyes bright and knowing, gazing into the camera. Derek sat back in his bedding, tent still pitched, a sharp pain flooding his chest. He laughed, the silent world around him deafening despite his wretched hearing. "Fuck." His eyes stung.  _"Fuck!"_ he screamed, voice lost to the vast emptiness of the land.

He stared down at the picture, heart aching, giving himself a moment, and then he was picking himself up, tucking the photograph safely away, and heading west.

 

❀❀❀

 

He'd forgotten what survival was truly like, what it meant to be exposed to the elements and starving and exhausted and wary of anything the land offered that seemed too good to be true. To make matters worse, the bike died on him after the first month. All the fixing and screwing and tightening and adjusting and replacing, all that time in the desert, all of it gone to waste. Food supply ran short after another eight days, water tiding him over until he happened upon the first people he had seen since Paradise, a caravan of barterers. He exchanged a week's labor for any information about Beacon Hills and a restock of food and water, then headed out once more. He ran out of that supply before the second month had gone by. The heat was agonizing, the terrain brutal, the trekking a nightmare in itself, even when the ghosts were most relentless.

Sometimes he'd realize his lips were moving, that he'd been talking to Laura for hours. Imaginary conversations. Cursing her for not being here, for not knowing whether this was all in vain, if the hope Stiles had revived in him would only break his heart in the end, like it always had. Weeks passed, still no sign of Beacon Hills. He knew he'd probably die soon. The world was big, with plenty of room for more nothingness and death.

He thought he'd finally lost his mind to the madness when he was trudging through the miles of dirt as usual, northbound, and Laura strode up next to him. So accustomed was he to his brain playing tricks that he didn't realize it wasn't his sister until the creature was blocking his path, head cocked, deep, yellow eyes staring up at him. Derek jerked back.

A wolf.

 _The_ wolf.

Dark and sleek and looking like the epitome of health. His coat was clean, ribs covered by toned muscle, tongue lolling slightly out of its mouth, though Derek imagined that however thirsty he was, Derek was a thousand times more so. He looked around, but all that stared back was endless wasteland. The wolf stepped into Derek's space before he could react, rubbing his head into Derek's leg. He bounced away, trotting back the way Derek had come. He cocked his head again when Derek didn't immediately understand. Something in Derek gave a tug. Whether he was thinking straight or not didn't matter anymore.

He followed the wolf west.

 

❀❀❀

 

There was a river.

Derek's initial instinct told him it was contaminated. No body of water this large could survive the death of the world and remain touchable.

But then he watched the wolf trot up and drink steadily from the stream. When he'd had his fill, he charged into the water, splashing around, water flying everywhere. If Derek had been less than convinced, he certainly was now. He cupped his hands in the river and brought the water to his lips.

Nothing had ever tasted so good. Wolf was still splashing about, getting Derek wet. Derek couldn't get mad. It felt like it'd been ages since he last saw or drank a drop of water. He guessed he had the rains to thank for that, and inhaled it until he felt like throwing up.

Afterward, he stared down at his own reflection in the water. Last time he'd seen himself was in the mirror of Stiles' Jeep, knowing he'd be leaving, trying to find the courage to break the subject before he headed inside. Nothing could make something like that easy.

Wolf yipped at him from further up the bank.

Derek picked himself up and started moving again.

 

❀❀❀

 

With each passing day, Laura grew more and more real. Derek saw her all the time: running on the horizon, hidden beneath the surface of the river, perched up on a ledge of a mountain, facing Derek, smiling, waiting.

She was there, right next to him, when he came upon a treeline.

 

❀❀❀

  

The community was small. Their representative was a woman named Melissa. Derek told her these were the first trees he'd seen since he was a boy. She was only slightly less suspicious of him after he said this. Derek couldn't blame her.

"We never received a direct hit," she told him. "But we might as well have." She gestured for him to follow after her. "The aftershocks took out most of what was standing. Majority of people had already evacuated, thinking they had time to get to the vaults." Her eyes were distant as she walked Derek up a dirt path from the main settlement. "Few were lucky." Derek clenched his jaw. "Somehow, some of it survived." She stopped. "Through there," she said, pointing into the woods. "The Hale House." Derek's head snapped towards her. She looked evenly back at him. "Go and see, Derek." His spine went stiff. "She left something for you."

He was running.

Wolf was on his heels, darting after him through the sea of trees.

A tire swing.

A familiar deck.

A burnt house.

He stood in front of it, chest heaving.

It was exactly what he'd feared all these years: his childhood home, empty, scorched, crumbling and broken. He fell to his knees, squeezing his eyes shut against the nightmare.

Hands touched his face and when Derek opened his eyes, a girl stood in front of him.

"You look crazy," his sister said.

Derek said nothing, heart racing, quietly regarding the hallucination. This was the most realistic one yet. She looked so real. Exactly as she looked before Derek had gone off to be a road warrior. Long, auburn locks, wide, pale eyes. She was his sister, before the world took her.

"Why are you here?"

"I kept my promise," Derek murmured, shaking his head until little hands steadied his face.

"You didn't have to," Laura told him, grinning like the world hadn't ended. "I'd understand."

"No," Derek said. "No, you said you'd be waiting. You were waiting for me. You said we'd see each other again." His shoulders began to shake with the effort it took to keep himself still, to not crush her to him and keep her here forever. "I'm here now."

Laura stroked his beard. "Can't stay," she said, tilting her head as she considered him, hair spilling over her shoulder. "You gotta let me go."

Derek trembled. He didn't know how to let her go. His family's memory was tucked away in his heart, but for some reason his mind kept tormenting him with memories of his sister. "How?" he whispered. "How? _How?"_ _I only went into that desert to forget about you. But the land was the color of your hair. The sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you-_

Derek felt himself smile, suddenly, and the tears fell easily, one from each eye, salty and heavy and running down his cheeks in tandem.

 _But then I saw something._ Laura raised her brows, curious.  _Him._ Derek laughed, despite the aching rhythm of his heart and the tightness in his throat. _I saw him._   _And I knew._

"What?" Laura beamed. "You knew what?"

"He was home," Derek whispered. "He was what I was running toward."

All at once, Derek felt a wave of peace wash over him, something he had not felt in a lifetime. Laura grinned, playful and bright. She ran off, disappearing into the tall grass, and Derek watched her go. He turned to climb up the creaking porch.

Inside, placed upon a charred table, lay Laura's badge and an outline of a house—a new house. Outside, Wolf began barking. Derek joined him, glancing up to take in what remained of the Hales, and he thought of his mate, because then, miraculously, it began to snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls don't hate me:(


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❀ [we are the only ones who know where we belong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ES7-GATxDA) ❀

There was a black wolf lazily sprawled out in the middle of the clearing which made Stiles stop and consider it. Around him, trees grew tall as the sky. The wind rustled the leaves, fluffy clouds drifting overhead. When he looked back at the wolf, it was now a man.

"Derek?"

His voice was distant, like an echo or a whisper. His mate was faintly smiling at him, arms spread out. "What do you think?"

Stiles looked around again, brows furrowing. "About what?"

Derek chuckled, and Stiles felt the rumble of his mate's laugh burrow down into the deepest parts of him. This wasn't real. None of this was real. He dreamt about his mate when Derek was not yet with him, and now he dreamed about Derek because he was gone.

"I'm gonna put the porch right up here," Derek began, gesturing in front of him. "The kitchen'll go back here-" he took a  step to the side, pointing at the tall grass. "And a library, for your books." He looked up, squinting against the sunlight. "You think you'll want an upstairs?"

"Derek," Stiles said. "What are you saying?"

Derek looked at him. "It's ours. This land." He stepped forward. "This life." His hands were warm on Stiles' waist as he held him. "I'm gonna build you a house," he murmured. "Right here. Our house." He wrapped his arms around the omega and kissed him. "Stiles," he breathed against the boy's lips. The sound of children's laughter in the background, the bark of a wolf, the shadow of a house against the pink sky.

Stiles shuddered. "Yes?"

Derek smiled, and Stiles felt himself fall in love all over again.

"Would you marry me?"

 

❀❀❀

 

The snow delayed the rebuilding process for three months.

Derek settled well as the winter passed. Wolf kept him company on the lonely days but was always wandering. Melissa pulled him out of his shell occasionally, inviting— _summoning_ —him down to the town for a drink or to assist her with something. Spring rolled around and melted the snow, though the showers took some getting used to. Seasonal change was still a foreign concept to Derek. But the wet soil allowed for easier deconstruction of what remained of the old house, so it was a blessing in disguise, to a certain extent.

He worked by day and dreamt of his mate by night. The dreams were both beautiful and terrible at once. Some of them he wasn't sure how to even interpret. Halfway to summer, Derek had the oddest one yet. Stiles had his hands resting on the swell of his rounded middle.

He was pregnant.

The dream revisited Derek every night from then on. Derek would rest his head against his mate's bump while they laid together in bed, Stiles running his fingers through Derek's thick locks and smiling. "Come back to me soon," Stiles would tell him, kissing his brow, and then Derek would wake, the space beside him cold and empty, still missing his family with every atom that he was made of.

 

❀❀❀

 

Stiles gave birth to a little baby girl on an early rainy morning.

Marin and Deaton were called to the house and stayed the whole day and an extra night, just to make sure all was well.

The kids read their new sister to sleep every chance they got.

When she was a month old, Derek returned.

 

❀❀❀

 

"Someone's coming," Erica announced, perched on the sofa, book in her lap. Lydia, sitting across from her, looked up.

Stiles put his daughter down in her bedding and joined them by the window. They all froze when the man's face grew clearer.

"It's the Rain Man," Lydia gasped, and all the kids were bolting out the door.

Stiles stood motionless, watching from the window as they raced towards Derek, who dropped his bags and went down like a collapsing mountain as the children tackled him. His hair was long and wild again, his skin covered in grime, dirt-streaked from head to toe, just like the first time Stiles saw him.

Stiles walked out onto the porch. Derek didn't see him at first, but when he finally glanced up, Stiles could see him take a breath, sighing as he looked upon his mate, an invisible weight being lifted off his shoulders. The children chattered excitedly, parting when Stiles approached. With him came a certain tension and they wandered off a bit, digging through Derek's bags, sensing that Stiles wanted a moment alone with the alpha.

"You came back," Stiles said, fidgeting with his linens.

Derek nodded, looking like he wasn't sure if he was allowed to draw closer, to hug his mate, to kiss him. "Of course I came back." His voice was thick and rough.

"You were gone a long time."

"Not yet a year."

Stiles bit his lip. "Your sister?"

"With the stars," Derek said softly, fondly, the hint of a smile in his words. He stepped forward, and Stiles pulled away, keeping his distance. Derek's brows furrowed.

"You did what you needed to do," Stiles said, voice hardening. "And now that I see you're okay, I never want to see you again."

Derek looked like Stiles had shot him. Stiles turned away.

"Wh– _Stiles-"_

Stiles whipped around. "You left me!"

"No, I never wanted to hurt you!"

"You _left_  me! I would've done _anything_ for you, and you chose _death_ over me!"

"I chose _life!"_

Stiles paused, chest aching, breathing heavy. Derek held a hand up, and with the other, reached into his jacket and pulled out a photograph. He held it up.

It was the house in the woods. The one from Stiles' dream. It was beautiful, with lots of windows and a porch and a swing and trees  _everywhere,_ and out front, in the clearing, where the tall grass had once been, now was a garden full of green, grown from the seeds Stiles had gifted Derek.

The alpha kept pulling out photographs, holding them up, showing Stiles.

"These are what my dreams look like," Stiles murmured, his guard dropping.

"I chose you, Stiles," Derek said, and he didn't let the omega pull away this time when he reached for him. "I chose _us."_

A hearty cry rose up from inside the house. They both stilled. Derek took a moment, but then he seemed to piece it all together, the magnitude of what Stiles had been through all these months slamming into him.

Stiles was pregnant and he left him.

"I'm scared," Derek whispered finally, and Stiles felt the cold shell around his heart crack and crumble, every trace of anger that had built up inside him falling away.

"Me, too," Stiles replied, and pulled Derek close, breathing his mate in. "Filthy, tsk, tsk," he muttered after a moment, pulling away, wrinkling his nose, and Derek's worried expression melted away. And he did wear every color of earth—in his clothes, on his skin, matted in his hair.  _His hair._ The déjà vu of their reunion was too real. "Gotta clean you up real right, Rain Man." Stiles ran his fingers through Derek's thick beard. "Think it's time we do something about this, hm? For your daughter."

Derek sucked in a breath. "I have a daughter."

Stiles cupped his face and kissed Derek, lips soft and warm against his mate's. He took Derek's hand, leading him back to the house. He replied, "She wants to meet you," and pulled Derek up the porch to wash the evidence of his long journey away.

 

❀❀❀

 

"I called him Rain Man," he heard Stiles' voice in their room, soft and comforting, telling their child their story. "There was no rain in the desert, where we live, but he was here. A very rare creature indeed." He looked up when Derek stood in the doorway. The alpha hesitated, glancing down at the soft bundle in Stiles' arms. The omega smiled, reassuring him, and Derek stepped inside.

They sat on the edge of the bed together for a minute, neither of them speaking. The child was calm and curious, eyes wandering around, locking on Derek.

"What's her name?" he asked.

Stiles smiled. "Tallulah."

Derek felt the knot in his throat triple in size.

"The first people of this land, before it was a desert, before it was a country, bordered and raped, a land to be possessed and owned, before anyone could hurt it—they created this name," Stiles said. "It means 'laughing water'." He looked at Derek. "And it sounds like your mother's name."

When the tears dripped down, Derek didn't hide them. He let Stiles see. He cried, and Stiles sat with him as he did, holding their daughter in his arms, rocking her back and forth, his warm side flush with Derek's, hip to shoulder. And when Derek was all cried out, throat tight and dry, lips chapped, two streaks of wetness running parallel down his freshly-shaven face, he looked at her—at his daughter—and he smiled, despite himself, something he hadn't done fully—not even for Stiles—in a long, long time.

It felt good. It felt right.

Stiles placed their daughter in his shaking hands, and helped Derek hold her until he had the gentle strength to do so himself, cradling her little, linen-clad body in one large palm, her small, pale head in the other, staring down at her, too afraid to blink in case he missed even a second of her cuteness.

"She's-" his voice cracked "-beautiful."  _There are no words. None lovely enough to describe what you are._ "She's-" his brows furrowed as he saw that she had already inherited a few of Stiles' constellations "-yours."

Stiles cupped the side of Derek's face, stroked his cheek. Their eyes met. "And yours." He covered the hand that held their daughter's head. "She's _ours_ , Derek." He smiled down at her once more, but Derek couldn't look away from him.

This boy, this beautiful boy, who had carried their child, brought her into this world, safe and healthy and the most precious thing that time would ever know—Stiles, a desert flower, a rose in this wasteland, Derek's very own guardian angel—he had done this. He was to the earth as water was, not designed to hold himself together, running freely like a river, bending and curling for the moon like a flame dancing across fuel. He was like air, everywhere and nowhere. He was everything Derek needed to live, to breathe. He had granted Derek a second life, had breathed hope and faith and kindness and bravery and love into Derek, had shown Derek a world he did not think he deserved.

And now he gave Derek a daughter.

"I love you," Derek said.

Stiles looked up at him once more, and he laughed, and he kissed Derek, and Derek kissed him, and then they were both smiling, and their teeth knocked, and it made them smile even more, and it was beautiful, and Derek knew he couldn't live without this.

"You remembered," Stiles sighed against his lips.

"Of course I remember," Derek said, and kissed him again, because he could, and he would, and, "I'd die before I forget something like that," and they couldn't stop kissing, and Derek's ghosts never showed their faces ever again.

 

❀❀❀

 

Derek loaded up the Jeep with the last of the seeds, an ample supply that Deaton and Marin had kept hidden for a moment like this, crates upon crates of all the ingredients to begin the world again. "There's a halo around you, child," Marin said to Stiles. "I dreamt this day would come. You were never meant to stay."

Stiles sniffled, and he hugged her, burying his face in her dark hair. "I'll come back," he assured. "I'll visit."

Deaton softly chuckled, gently patting his back. He cupped Stiles' face in his wrinkled hands, and pressed his lips to the boy's forehead. He shook his head and said wistfully, frankly, "Don't."

He helped Stiles into the Jeep, placing Tallulah in the boy's arms. He stroked the child's cheek. "There is a whole world out there. You'll see." Stiles thought he was talking to the baby, but when he looked up, Deaton was looking at him, fond, proud, and Stiles gripped the man's hand, kissed his knuckles.

"I'll never forget," he promised. "Not any of it."

The house his father built shrunk into the dry landscape as they drove away, Marin and Deaton arm in arm, waving, disappearing in the rearview mirrors. The kids were subdued in the back of the Jeep, and Stiles couldn't really blame them. This had been their whole life. Tallulah snuffled inside her linens, gummy smile lighting up, chubby little hands trying to catch the wind.

Before they reached the Pass, Derek casually reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled something out. "A gift," he told Stiles, motioning for the omega to hold out his hand. Stiles obeyed, slipping Tallulah into the crook of his right arm, cradling her while he held out his left hand. Derek slid a ring onto his fourth finger. When he looked at where Derek was gripping the wheel, he saw that the alpha was also wearing one.

"Smooth," Stiles said, grinning, and Derek simply laughed, pulling back the hood, and the children yelped and cheered, the wind carrying them across the desert.

Stiles couldn't stop looking at his mate. _His mate._ Derek did things for Stiles that the Colonel—or any man—never could. The Colonel had come for Stiles like a king demanding his due—he had commanded and taken. But Derek—Derek had desired Stiles, not for youthful dalliance, as the Colonel had, but for permanent things—companionship, the creation of a life, a family. Love.

Stiles bit his lip, contemplating telling Derek what was on his tongue. The alpha watched him, amused. Maybe he knew Stiles was falling in love the whole time. He probably knew from the first moment they laid eyes on each other.

"I dreamed about this," Stiles said a moment later.

Derek looked over at him. "Me, too," he replied, reaching over to brush a large hand over Tallulah's soft head. "The house, the kids-" he glanced down at his daughter "-her."

Stiles gazed back at him. "I remember. And there was a wolf-"

A howl rose up in the distance, and Derek smirked.

Stiles laughed. He wasn't sure what to make of their connection, their dreams—of anything that had happened. All he knew was that it brought them together, time and time again.

He glanced back at the kids, cuddled close together, talking away, hair whipping around, smiling from ear to ear. He settled back into his seat, sighing, hand reaching out to tangle with Derek's. 

They sped through the Pass, leaving Paradise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trust me when I say I made myself cry.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who showed this fic some love, you are all the absolute greatest! I've got another project lined up that I'm hoping to put out real soon, so keep an eye out! Also, those of you that are disappointed by the lack of fluffy pregnancy moments, I do apologize. I was trying to squeeze a lot into this fic, and I really had to wrap things up.
> 
> Side note: I am the type of person to post something and furiously edit it afterwards, so to those of you who have ever downloaded my previous works, if you want to hit the refresh on those, they are now completely typo-free, etc.
> 
> Shameless self-promotion: [my Tumblr](https://bullsnatch.tumblr.com/)
> 
> ♥,  
> Nark


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